"Recovery server could not be contacted" Error Message

Hi Markus,

You have to wait for the promt again and if you are running Recovery from Internet this might be slow.

Just wait for the bash promt after you have hit enter, close the Terminal and try again - do not reboot or do anything else in between. 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.

***NOTE IT IS THE CLOCK BEING WRONG****

I JUST had this problem ...bought a new SSD and followed set up unplugged battery as instructed installed hard drive to have it say can't connect to recovery server...since I have had clock issues with other computers before after 7 HOURS of trying to figure out what was wrong..granted if clock showed with new hard drive I would of checked it out there but no access to clock...I decided to put the old hard drive back since it was still working shut it off DID NOT UNPLUG BATTERY this time ..turned it on ...and CLOCK WAS WRONG ...reset it and powered off leaving battery plugged in and reinstalled new hard drive and IT WORKED ...update worked and OSX installed w/o a hitch...

Thanks for posting and thank you all for helping!! This was very helpful. For some reason, I came this morning to turn my macbook pro on and I don’t know why but it wouldn’t load all the after the password step. So I looked up some ways to fix it and had to erase disk but the problem to reinstall remained. I found this post after trying for hours and learned how to use terminal windows from utility disk screen.. then learned how to correct the date ( don’t type his numbers lol, I was doing that at first, newbie :)) ... reconnect to wifi( It doesn’t automatically reconnect), and reinstall ( make take hours lol). Thank you!

I tried a few solutions here, none works. Turned out neither WIFI couldn't get an IP and can't connect to Apple Servers.

So I run a LAN cable from the router direct to the iMac and using Network Utility I was able to see the iMac was getting an IP and packets are flowing OK.

That solved my problem with the error.

1) Verify that you are connected to the internet and try again. If this does not solve your problem move onto step 2.

2)Open terminal and type: ntpdate -u time.apple.com

3)Then try and run the installation again.

Maybe that ll be usefull for whom...

Got troubles too, but I cant install update, coz when I was prepared ssd for install, I was made it APFS, but for correctly clean installing, like i have you need standart MacOS format and yea, set right time in terminal

How do I get out of this thread? Idiots keep posting theories but I posted the solution above and people keep saying things that don't work

You have to do the terminal command to sync the time, the cmos battery has died so the time can't be kept correct, the cmos battery is suffered to the board cause Apple and if you remove it threads say nothing but problems occur

After new battery, gray screen and shut down. Not booting. Not connecting to apple in recov. I was able to change date in terminal. Wil try to recover os. Wants to go to sierra I am still on capitan.

Used your time zone

I am highly surprise that a server could be so much busy that on 5 January, still it is not updating. Then what was it doing in past years, how could we update our system? Myself PhD in Computer Science, I am not a kid and I am fully angry by this act that apple has done. It is better that apple must be do paid software update. Really, even apple is not giving any way to be get updated and I know that I am not only one of them.

@sirqaim Did you verify that the system date is correct, as discussed earlier in the thread? That solved the problem for me. The error message presented is erroneous -- it's not a "server busy" problem, despite what the computer says.

I had the same problem, but this is what I did, I needed to change my macbook date and time

on your macOS X Utility

Click on the Utilitie and you will get a dropdown list, select terminal

Type this command line there sudo ntpdate -u time.apple.com

and try again, you are good to go... It works for me, I believe it will for you too

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.

This worked for me. (Manually trying to set the time in Terminal using the date ############... thing that someone suggested didn't work for me.)

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

Been scouring the net for answers

My high Sierra was fine on imac 2011 but suddenly screen went white.

Now any thing in reboot won’t work - I get a grey screen. I’ve done all the usual steps even internet recoverybut it just goes to grey/white screen.

Any suggestions? Hardware test didn’t show any issues either. Recovery mode load and when I click on my backup drive it just goes to grey screen.