hope you can help me here. My MacBook Pro 2019, 16 inches, with a T2 security chip, systematically times out when trying to reinstall Catalina in recovery mode, after erasing the main drive. The T2 chip dissallows booting from external drive, when trying to create an offline bootable installer.
What I've done:
- Enter recovery mode (boot with Command + R pressed)
- Erased the hard drive to make a fresh installation of Catalina,
- Started the reinstall Catalina utility, which fetches Catalina from Apple servers.
- Everything goes smooth until 90% of the installation, when it times out. I've tried this many times, on different internet connections.
- Made an external bootable drive with a Catalina offline installer I found using the Catalina Patcher software.
- Pluged the external drive to the Macbook. Problem: the Macbook does not allow to boot from external drives because of the T2 chip.
- Tried to change the permissions to be able to boot from the external drive through the "Startup Security Utility" app (in recovery mode), but it requests admin privileges, and there is no admin in the computer (as I erased the main drive in step 1), so I get the "No administrator was found" error.
Please help!
Best Answer
This is how I solved the issue.
You need another Apple computer running Catalina.
Hope this helps other people.