"Recovery server could not be contacted" Error Message

Get a terminal window, frome the recovery menu. The menu bar at the top, not the window dot in the middle. Then enter the date command and you should see some some old date at January 1st. My MBP has a battery problem and wasn’t plugged in for a while so the system date got reset.

To fix type

date 1016200017

which is October 16th 20:00 (or 8pm) 2017.

So mmddhhmiyy

all two digits.

After that recovery worked. Must have something to do with certificate validity or something maybe.

Ge to recovery menu (restart your machine and press cmd + R). when at the recovery window, look for terminal window, frome the recovery menu. if you can't find it, check under window. Then enter the date command and you should see some some old date at January 1st. My MBP has a battery problem and wasn’t plugged in for a while so the system date got reset.

To fix type

date 1016200017

which is October 16th 20:00 (or 8pm) 2017.

So mmddhhmiyy

all two digits.

Just copy the above instructions as they are. Curtesy Jo Desmet

SOLUTION:

1.Boot Mac while holding Command and R(enter recovery mode)

2.Once the loading bar appears you can let go of Command and R

3.Once at the recovery screen go to Utilites in the top menu Bar

4. Open Terminal

5. Type

ntpdate -u time.apple.com

6. Press enter, wait for a response, then go to Finder Quit Terminal

7. install Mac OS

8.Need more help? Check out the link below

REASON AND ISSUE:

The time on your Mac is off, mine was off by .00356 sec or something and this solved it

SOURCE:

https://becomethesolution.com/blogs/mac/the-recovery-server-could-not-be-contact ed-mac-os-sierra

I just had the problem and the solution was quite simple... it happened that when I erased the Macintosh drive it deleted the saved password to my wifi. So I simply clicked on the top right corner on the wifi symbol and reconnected.

THE CORRECT TERMINAL COMMAND IS: ntpdate -u time.apple.com

Credit to levlaz here: https://gist.github.com/levlaz/16b63384bd5e1bee3593be0d91aedbd7

Full post below:

I was trying to reinstall High Sierra on an older MacBook Air using internet recovery and I kept on getting an error message when trying to reinstall High Sierra.

The recovery server could not be contacted

It appears that this has to do with the time on the machine not being synchronized, so when the MacBook tries to reach out to the recovery server the certificates do not validate and we get this useless error message.

To fix this.

1. Open up a Terminal from the utilities menu
2. Enter the following command

ntpdate -u time.apple.com

1. Try to install High Sierra again. It should just work™.

What I had to end up doing was recovery booting , open disk utility and completely nuke everything but the recovery partition. Then boot back up into internet recovery mode. This takes forever but eventually you will get back to the recovery menu and from there just reinstall OSX , it will look like it’s hung up on 5 or 6 minutes or whatever but eventually it will finish. It might take a couple hours. Just wait it out and it will reformat your hard drive and your system will be like new. Oh, and you’ll lose any saved data so before you do this try to move your data around with the command line back in recovery mode.(look up copying files via terminal).

If you are trying to install Mac OS X (while in mac os recovery mode) onto a new volume on your Mac over your LAN network or Wi-Fi, you may receive an error.

The recovery server could not be contacted.

A solution provided by a user (Brano) on our site:

1. Launch Terminal and type:

ntpdate -u time.apple.com

2. Proceed normally.

The problem is, SYSTEM DATE is wrong, and CERT validation is failing (https)

First, ensure your Mac is connected to a wired or wireless network. To connect wired network, plug an Ethernet cable in. To connect to a wireless network, go to the top right corner of the screen and choose the wireless icon and connect to a network.

As with others in this thread, setting the date using the date command in Terminal worked for me too.

Even though my battery was fully charged (and normally the date is fine) it still showed as an incorrect date when I typed date at the prompt.

To fix it I typed date 1215115317 at the prompt which set the date and time to December 15 2017 at 11:53 AM, closed the Terminal and then tried to install the OS again. This time it worked!

Thank you this was my problem. In recovery mode, I did as you mentioned. I accessed the Terminal via drop down menu on the bar. Then used the window that is opened which is blank. I checked the date just to make sure that was the problem. All I had to do is type Date. The date came back to January 1st. It was here that I knew I had to change it. So, I inputted the correct UTC time in the format you provided mmddhrmiyr (month day time in military format and year). WALA! Problem solved! I was able to by pass the RECOVERY SERVER COULD NOT GET CONTACTED prompt.

Note: you will need the current UTC time! All you need to do is google “current UTC” and that is it. Formatted as mentioned above and enter. Quit terminal and go back to reinstall software.

I was trying to reinstall High Sierra on an older MacBook Air using internet recovery and I kept on getting an error message when trying to reinstall High Sierra.

The recovery server could not be contacted

It appears that this has to do with the time on the machine not being synchronized, so when the MacBook tries to reach out to the recovery server the certificates do not validate and we get this useless error message.

To fix this.

1. Open up a Terminal from the utilities menu
2. Enter the following command

sudo ntpdate -u time.apple.com

Try to install High Sierra again. It should just work™.

Quoting literally user Jo Desmet below, this solved it for me:

"Get a terminal window, frome the recovery menu. The menu bar at the top, not the window dot in the middle. Then enter the date command and you should see some some old date at January 1st. My MBP has a battery problem and wasn’t plugged in for a while so the system date got reset.

To fix type

date 1016200017

which is October 16th 20:00 (or 8pm) 2017.

So mmddhhmiyy

all two digits.

After that recovery worked. Must have something to do with certificate validity or something maybe."

Remember to use the current date.

Solved.

In my case I was trying to do a re-install of the OS form the startup utilities and kept getting this error.

The trick was to set the clock. Start the Terminal app from utilities to get a bash terminal. Type `date` to display the current date/time. In my case it was set to January 1st. I remember it was common with Windows Update to fail to update your system if the system clock was not "close" to the correct time.

Set the date with:

date 1114125317

(this example sets the date to November 14th, 12:53 2017)

Re-run the recover OS option and it should work.

In my case it was a proxy server blocking requests.

All my machines go through Privoxy as part of having a sane Internet experience. One Mac refused to install High Sierra. Checking the Privoxy logs the problem machine was blocked when contacting sr.symcd.com and s2.symcb.com (Symantec domains, wha?) in addition to the permitted accesses to iadsdk.apple.com, swcdn.apple.com, swdist.apple.com and swscan.apple.com. None of my other Macs tried to access those domains but when I temporarily whitelisted them the install process completed successfully.

I just had this problem. Do a restart while holding Option. Ensure that your WiFi network is selected to give the system somewhere to look for the recovery server. Select your recovery drive for the startup.

And just to further clarify, use UTC, NOT your own time zone. If you don’t know what time it currently is in UTC use this: https://time.is/UTC

I just went through the same issue and couldn’t get past it until I used UTC time.

Thanks for the tip!