[FIXED] The Recovery Server Could Not Be Contacted Error! High Sierra Internet Recovery Error

hey everyone Mr McIntosh here if you're trying to install or reinstall ma OS higher from internet recovery or regular recovery and are getting the error message the recovery server could not be contacted this video is for you contrary to popular belief Apple has not pulled down the old recovery system servers this is not the date and time error or the certificate error and we need to be able to fix this I jumped into an investigation with Dina K the co-developer of opencore Legacy Patcher to be able to find the root of this issue and we're going to fix it next as a companion to this video I wrote a detailed article that shows you three different ways that you can fix this issue with all the screenshots commands and everything that you'll need and I'll include a link to this in the description we're going to quickly talk about the root of the problem we're going to talk about how Dina K and I came to find the issue of the problem and then I'm going to go over the three different ways the first section is going to show you how to boot to a newer version of Mago internet recovery that does not have this issue the second one is going to be able to create a Mac OS High seere bootable USB installer but if you don't have the ability to do that like you only have one Mac or you don't have a USB device drive then you're going to be able to go to step number three where we're going to change the MV Ram software update URL to be able to get it working again what is the root of this problem I started this investigation earlier this year when I started to see some posts on Reddit and the Apple support form saying I'm getting the error the recovery server could not be contacted and a lot of the Articles and people said that Apple has took offline the old internet Recovery Service well that's not true because you're still able to boot internet recovery but the problem is inside the security framework of Mac OS High Sierra and that's what the root of the problem is so when you get this error what happens is is that you have to download the entire version of Mac OS higher from Apple servers but when you click continue it tries to get the software update URL and cannot get that URL so when you click that that's what happens and this is the area that you get fail to load the catalog software swc apple.com and then the index software update URL when I tried to fix this I said well what's wrong I tried to use the curl binary and I got the air that it immediately closed my connection the requested feature protocol was not found in the built-in lib curl due to a build time decision once I got to that part that's when I had to reach out to Dina K who is an absolute expert in the co-developer of open cor C Patcher to be able to figure out what the heck this issue is so what he found is after investigation that something broke in the internal SSL security verification or the security that framework within higher and is unable to resolve the https SSL URL now that we know that how do we fix the issue well the first easiest way to do that is if your Mac supports a newer version of Mac OS Mojave or newer you can just boot to a newer version of Internet recovery on your Mac and those versions do not have this issue and I included a little screenshot on the commands used to be able to do that command R boots you into internal recovery on your Mac OS hard drive command option R boots you to the Mac OS that is the latest compatible version with your Mac so for example if your Mac is compatible with MACC Catalina it'll boot right to that and you'll have no issues and you can install that and the shift option command art is the earliest version available of Mac OS that supports your Mac and you can see this with everymac.com for example with this 2014 MacBook Pro it supports Mac OS Mavericks and Mac OS biger is the maximum so if you booted to Mac OS big internet recovery you wouldn't have the issue wonder if your Mac only supports like this MacBook Air that we're going to use here only supports to Mac host higher well the real easiest way to fix this right off the bat is if you have a Mac OS higher bootable USB installer just boot to that and you don't have the issue because the OS is on the USB and you do not have to reach out to Apple to get it but wonder if you don't have a USB installer or you only have one Mac and you can't create one well that's what comes into the fix number three that D helped me understand and figure out and what this involves is is booting to recovery and setting an NV Ram entry that will change the url from SSL to Port 80 HTTP traffic and it'll be able to contact this self update URL and download the full installer so let's jump right into our demonstration unit to watch that in action now one thing to mention is make sure that you are connected to Wi-Fi if you're booting to internal recovery if you're connected to Internet recovery you have to be connected to Wi-Fi or ethernet to even get here and also make sure that your date and time is correct so you can go into utilities go to terminal and type in date and hit enter and as long as your date is Right On Target today is December 31st 2023 we're good to go if it's off by a couple months or a year you're going to have problems reaching the URL anyway so make sure that that's correct so you're in Mac OS recovery whether internet recovery or internal recovery and you want to be able to reinstall Mac OS let's say you already erased the drive and you're trying to make the system work again so you click reinstall Mac OS and it's going to go to the next screen to install maosi here you're like all right we're ready to go you'll click on continue and this is where it'll take a little bit it's going to try to reach out to Apple to get that software update URL but then fail because of the security transport problem with SSL communication we give it a second here to fully fail out and there it is it failed but what we're going to do to fix F this issue is we need to get that URL now you can copy that from my article and continue on to the next step but if you want to be able to get the exact URL we're going to copy it so you don't make any typos we're going to click window and then click on installer log and then what we're going to do is this is the install log here we're going to click continue to get that URL click on continue and what we're going to do is click on this log here scroll all the way to the top and this is the one we're looking for right here fail to load catalog URL click on this and then you can either hit command C to copy it or go up to to edit and click copy now what we're going to do now is we're going to change that URL inside the terminal so we're going to click okay to close this cuz we already got it copied now we're going to go into utilities click on Terminal and we're going to open up a terminal window command plus to make the window bigger now we're going to paste that entire command so we can click on edit or command V to paste and it's going to paste the entire command now keep in mind it included all the date and stuff and that's okay because we need to grab this URL here so you can click on here with your your mouse cursor or your trackpad and we need to copy this entire URL all the way to Su catalog right at the G so when we got that all highlighted we can hit command C to copy or we can go back up to the edit menu and hit copy now we got to start typing in our Command now I pasted the full command that we're going to use down here in the second window but we're going to go back up to here and start typing this command here and we have to type it in it is case sensitive so we're going to type in NV Ram because we're going to write in a botle Ram command NV Ram space capital i a s u c catalog Capital URL equals quote and we're going to paste that URL by going up to edit or do a command V to paste now we have the entire URL in here but we have to change this from https to http so what we'll do is we'll hit contr a to go back to the beginning of the line and then use our Arrow key to get right to the S and then hit the delete key to take out the S now the S is gone and now we can hit control e for end we're at the end of the command and we'll do a shift quote which is right next to the return key and we have our full command all we're doing is changing that https to http so we can contact this URL to be able to download Mac OS higher so we'll hit enter and if it goes back back to the command terminal we did it correctly now you can actually see that by typing in NV RAM dasp for print and we can now see that URL that we added to Envy Ram now we can click on Terminal and click quit we can go back to the main menu all we need to do is click on continue and then click on continue again give it a second here and there we go MOS higher if we go back and look at that log we can see that it was able to make that contact if we scroll all the way to the top and then if you click on show all logs and you can type in HTTP you can see using catalog Source NV Ram HTTP and then loaded the catalog and that's how we able to get here and that's how to fix it so let me know if you have any questions in the comments about this whole process I know this part is a little bit involved with typing in the commands and everything then it can get you out of that jam to be able to install maos high sier again huge thanks to Dina k for helping me jump in and dive into this issue and helping me figure out what the actual route and a wonderful workaround was what's interesting is Mago Sierra 10.12 is also broke but it's broke for a different reason the actual package itself is unable to unpack to be able to install the operating system and hopefully I'll be able to jump into that and work with him to be able to fix that in another video thanks for watching and we'll catch you in the next one thanks

Channel: Mr. Macintosh

Views: 136,545

Keywords:

Id: ouNQS36dIBw

Length: 9min 30sec (570 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 01 2024