What does this mean? I’m trying to reinstall macOS High Sierra! Can’t get past this error message “the recovery server could not be contacted”
[Re-Titled by Moderator]
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.
I had similar issue....but wait.... wow just changing the date to the current updated date did resolve the issue. Thanks
double check you are connected to the internet, after you wipe your drive you could lose wifi settings.
Make sure you are connected to Wifi! It sounds silly but you have to sign in separately to your Wifi when reinstalling 🙂
Hi, this also happened to me after erasing the Mac disk. Problem was - the Mac no longer recognised the wifi.
Solution - make sure you're connected to the internet.
Does this work?
Go to #4 in https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208969 to download High Sierra. It should download the 10.13.6 installer.
In the recovery window mac does not connect to wireless by default. On the top right click on wireless icon, connect to your network then give it a try again. As the other user suggested I also set the date thru terminal before installing. It worked for me.
Correcting the date/time did not correct the issue for me. What did was;
1. Create a new admin user
2. Log off as the current user
3. Log back in using the new admin account
4. Go to the Applications folder and run the installation
Hope this helps. -=V=-
I had the same issue after I wiped the drive on my MacBook Pro. When you wiped the drive you selected the wrong format. All you need to do is simply go to disk utilities and erase the drive again, but this time select APFS (Encrypted) rather than just APFS. You may now click Reinstall macOS High Sierra. Side note, make sure you have internet connection in your status bar.
You are probably not connected to the Internet. You may need to sign in every time you do the Command R. (There is no prompt!). So the message "the recovery server could not be contacted", really means you are not online or connected to the internet.
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
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).'
For me, even though I connected before getting into the recovery screen, I had to click on the wifi icon at the very top right (hard to see) and reselect my network and enter the password. I didn't need to try to connect with the Terminal (commands were missing anyway at the Bash 3.2# prompt on my 2010 iMac. This got me a little farther, up the point where I could see "Select the disk where you wan tto install macOS." and there were no disks. (Grr.)
I was actually getting this error message due to unreliable WiFi connection or probably Apple Server was busy fulfilling the request. I tried all the steps mentioned at https://becomethesolution.com/blogs/mac/the-recovery-server-could-not-be-contact ed-mac-os-sierra and The Recovery Server could not be contacted error while upgrading Mac but it did not fix the problem. So I deleted the previously downloaded High Sierra installater which was surprisingly just 19MB in Size. I copied the Full version of macOS High Sierra installer of around 5 GB from another Mac and transferred over to my Mac. Installed the high sierra from the copied files with no issue.
First we need to connect to a internet network and then the Installation will be carried out.
I too got this problem at first and then I realised that I haven't connected to a network.
On top right WiFi logo can be seen click it and select a network and proceed to the installation.
The real issue for me was the time synchronization with apple server.
The solution down here foxes the synchronization from command line and works
http://gist.github.com/levlaz/16b63384bd5e1bee3593be0d91aedbd7
"Recovery server could not be contacted" Error Message
