"Recovery server could not be contacted" Error Message

I ran in to this problem and found a solution....

Actually your Mac looses it's wifi connection sometimes when you wipe your drive. Clicking the wifi button (top right corner) and connecting to the internet will set the correct date and time for you. After that it works, enjoy 👌

mostly it means migration assistant (because let's face it, you are here trying to reinstall macos because migration assistant already failed for you and insisted on keeping a botched transfer of your main account and now will not let you try that again but instead wants you to send your real account to some made-up name that does not conflict with the botched initial transfer that is somehow really really important to preserve), anyway, where were we? right, reinstall macOS. Because Migration Assistant just got confused enough to toast your machine and you can't think of anything better than scrubbing it all and starting over, and like me you are frustrated that there seems no way to do that.

I am searching for the the jealously guarded really-really-wipe-my-machine-and-start-over option, and promise to update this post if i ever find it. They have hidden it well. Does this ever turn out ok?

While on the screen with an error on top left you should see a menu. “Utilities” section will have “Network...” section. I tried to ping google.com and got no response meaning no internet connection (even though this Mac has already been connected to my Wi-Fi). I have plugged in Ethernet cable (I am using iMac) and tested ping again. This time it worked. After that I was able to successfully recover OS with no error message. Hope that helps.

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™.

If you literally did exactly what he said, then that may be the issue. The numbers provided we're specific to that date and time. Edit yours to match today and the current time.

You gotta enter the current date. It worked for me. Try that. If still error exists, try contacting Apple!

For me it was because I had not reconnected to my wireless network. Just confirm that you are connected and you should be good to go. Check icon in upper right on the menu bar.

This resolved it for me: https://gist.github.com/levlaz/16b63384bd5e1bee3593be0d91aedbd7

This just happened to me but I realised that when you erase the drive it also erases your wifi passwords as well so I wasn't connected to any kind of wifi. Sometimes it's as simple as reconnecting.

Hello! Was just going through this thread as im currently facing a similar situation. Does the date thing still work for a 2013 laptop? Or do i use the current date?

Make sure that you are connected to the interned. As it turned out internet recovery `forgets` wifi settings that you entered at the beginning. Wifi icon is at the top right corner. Cheers.

To fix type

sudo date 0307035919

which is March 7th 03:59 (or 3:59Aam) 2019.

So mmddhhmiyy

all two digits.