"Recovery server could not be contacted" Error Message

🙂😝

d4ma7or wrote:

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).

The UTC time wasn’t an issue for me. It is something to do with age of the MacBook and the EFI partition. I tried to run a Windows 10 USB and cleaned all partitions including EFI, then quitted the installation. Restarted the OS X recovery, and the connection to the server was fine but the OS X given was Mountain Lion, the original version shipped with the device. I am planning to upgrade the OS X later.

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.

Question, every time I type that code in I press enter. I then close the window and try to download the OS again. After it still refuses to download i go back to terminal and the code is gone. what is the actual way to save the code in terminal because it keeps erasing it. Thanks.

In some cases, your hosts file may prevent access to update server. Check your /etc/hosts file and make sure that you are not blocking the following servers:

127.0.0.1 swscan.apple.com

127.0.0.1 swquery.apple.com

127.0.0.1 swdownload.apple.com

127.0.0.1 swcdn.apple.com

127.0.0.1 swdist.apple.com

How are you trying to reinstall macOS High Sierra? What OS is currently running on your Mac? Are you trying to perform an upgrade or fresh install of High Sierra? What steps have you taken, so far, to try to resolve this yourself?

Have you tried the solution from this post: Re: The recovery server could not be contacted.

If yes and it didn't work out, you can try searching for the solution out of the apple discussion.

I have searched and found different things, I don't know if these might help you since I can't test them but, you can just check it out:

http://blog.peschla.net/2011/09/trouble-with-ntpdate/

https://www.martin-brennan.com/set-timezone-from-terminal-osx/

https://slaptijack.com/system-administration/set-mac-os-x-time-zone-from-the-com mand-line/

I am not sure why it won't let you change the time. I am not a mac expert here or anything, just willing to share what I've figured.

I apple, it's either you DIY, bring your mac to them to fix it, have a geek friend to fix it for you, or nothing else. I'll leave the rest to you.

Best of luck.

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™.

if you are attempting to use a WiFi connection, plug in a network cable instead.

So, you can or cannot download that?

Are you still having connection problems?

To fix type

sudo date 0307035919

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

So mmddhhmiyy

all two digits.

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.

Patty.W wrote:

🙂😝

d4ma7or wrote:

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).'

Check to make sure you are connected to the internet. I got the same message and when I checked on network preferences, it was disconnected from my wifi for some reason. I reconnected and was then able to reinstall Mac OS High Sierra.

Jo Desmet, brilliant. This worked.

In Windows Server if a machine is off from the UTC date/time the server won't communicate with the machine. The server is like, "Hey wow, if your time doesn't jive with mine then there is no way you are from my network: Stranger Danger!!!"

Thanks for the elegant solution. I'm going to have to save this in my brain and notes!!