3rd-gen MacBook Air stuck in booting Internet Recovery Mode

[dandeco]

We have four 2020 Retina 13" MacBook Airs (the last Intel model) at my workplace. I was able to remove their firmware passwords via hooking them up to my M1 MacBook Air with a Thunderbolt 3 cable and restoring them with Apple Configurator 2. But on two of them so far, when I try to boot them from Internet Recovery Mode, among selecting a Wi-Fi network, it's just stuck on the screen with choosing a network, with the little spinning icon next to the Wi-Fi selection window and the spinning globe. Also, the cursor moves VERY SLOWLY when using the trackpad.

I tried also "Reviving" them via Apple Configurator 2 to see if that updates the firmware, but that didn't make a difference. Neither did resetting the NVRAM and SMC. Is there another step I'm missing?

 

[PaulD-UK]

I’m doing the same process. Same situation.
It works better with Ethernet ie fails quicker 😫

What is causing the stalling is the failure to find Apple’s restore servers.
Because the Mac has no current DNS setup it’s lost - until it finds its way….

I found after about an hour and a half just spinning I rebooted and found it completed the process in about 20 mins (with Ethernet).

A real pain.

 

[dandeco]

I’m doing the same process. Same situation.
It works better with Ethernet ie fails quicker 😫

What is causing the stalling is the failure to find Apple’s restore servers.
Because the Mac has no current DNS setup it’s lost - until it finds its way….

I found after about an hour and a half just spinning I rebooted and found it completed the process in about 20 mins (with Ethernet).

A real pain.

I tried Ethernet on one of them, and now I'm getting somewhere...

Now it says it'll load in four hours, but I'll wait and see... it could still take around 20 minutes. Especially since I punch out in less than an hour today...

 

[PaulD-UK]

I found that it sometimes 'finds its way' and the timer resets. Several times during the process.

 

[PaulD-UK]

If the progress bar stays at the start end for very long I think its stalled.

 

[Ben J.]

Those installations are in my experience totally confusing to try and follow. The progress bar sits, then jumps, then you get a restart, and NO progress bar, then a restart, and so on. I've learned to just leave it alone, and eventually it will succeed. If it doesn't finish in an hour or four, depending on the connection speed, I'd start to worry. I would certainly be very cautious about stopping the install mid-process, as that could make things worse, you'd think.

There's also the option to install from a bootable installer drive.

I know nothing about 'removing firmware passwords' and using Configurator 2… Is that supposed to be impossible? T2 chip and everything?

 

[dandeco]

There's also the option to install from a bootable installer drive.

I know nothing about 'removing firmware passwords' and using Configurator 2… Is that supposed to be impossible? T2 chip and everything?

I can't. They don't support external booting unless I install a Mac OS profile, reboot it into Recovery mode and enable external drive booting support.

Also, regarding removing a firmware password using Apple Configurator 2, it CAN be done...
https://www.reddit.com/r/macsysadmin/comments/mcpmji
Yeah, when trying to boot them into Internet Recovery Mode via Ethernet, the estimated time increases until it stops at 24:00 and stays there. Something is definitely going wrong...

 

[PaulD-UK]

I've had do this a number of times...
The stalling is down to failure to handshake with Apple's Recovery servers. In my experience, anyway. With my 0.5 Gigabit ethernet.
I just left the Mac stalled for a couple of hours (with no progress on the bar) during which time my router logged tens of MB of upload traffic but 0MB of download. So it was repeatedly making interrogation requests and finding no answer.

Then I restarted a number of times - until it started to move the progress bar. Eventually it completed with a number of mini-stops along the way.
If the Mac is shut down after its begun downloading if you restart it continues from where it left off.
So monitoring the router download traffic is the best way to work out that the process IS underway...

 

[dandeco]

Yeah, I tried having one of the Airs loading Internet Recovery via Ethernet overnight, and it made no progress. Among resetting and trying it again, no luck. But I may be able to make some progress if I take one or two of them home and connect them to my network; I can at least re-install the Mac OS on them there during the night and bring them back into work the next morning, ready to be logged and re-sold online.

 

[dandeco]

I think I may have found the cause of the problem: many of those MacBook Airs have bad batteries! The one I had success with, the battery was still pretty healthy. But with others, among doing some research online, I learned a bad battery can indeed slow down such a Mac laptop. And I do want to use one of those Airs for my Intel Mac needs on the job (specifically a 2018 MacBook Air with 16 GB of RAM and a 512 GB SSD), especially for creating bootable MacOS USB installers and for wiping other 2016-20 Intel Mac laptops via Apple Configurator 2. I was able to get Sonoma installed on it, but it was an unusually slow process, and among booting it's pretty sluggish, again likely due to the battery being so depleted it only holds a 1% charge.
Now I'm debating whether I should take that 2018 Air to the Apple Store and have them replace the battery, or if I should order a replacement battery and me and a co-worker can replace it ourselves? I mean, with the latter option, buying a replacement battery would be roughly half the cost of having the Apple Store replace it (which would be around $150), and I do need to watch what I spend since I'm still a little tight on funds after replacing my car. Plus, the aforementioned co-worker has removed such batteries attached with an adhesive from such computers before, so I think we can do it, especially since it'll be used for work here.
But the other Airs with dead batteries, since I already removed the firmware passwords and wiped the SSDs from them, we can probably just list them as "parts or repair" computers and still get some money from them.