Attempted a clean install of Catalina from a USB thumb drive on a 2018 Mac Mini.
I went to macOS Recovery to enable booting from the external USB thumb drive. I was asked for the admin password. I entered my admin password and it is not accepted. There is only one user account, and it is an admin account.
Have no idea how to fix this; any assistance is appreciated.
Hello,
I just got similar issue with a Mini 2018. Some months ago, I decreased Security level using my admin account to allow booting from an external disk without checking Apple OS. At that time I was with Mojave 10.14.6.
Yesterday, I wanted to make a copy of my Mojave baseline before switching to Catalina.
I successfully jumped into Recovery mode, but got exactly same issue when I wanted to check the Security settings: my admin PWD was rejected!!! I spent 2h finding a solution. Finally I gave up and restore a time machine copy from Mojave.
After, it was a massive mess: each time I attempted to entre in Recovery mode, it jumped to Ethernet Recovery. Same if starting in boot manager mode and selected the USB installer: sounded my recovery partition was gone!!!
And to complete the mess, at then end of Ethernet recovery, it ended in an error, killing the process.
I spent all afternoon trying and finally ended by installing Catalina from the USB installer without rebooting...
After, I got following changes:
- Recovery mode back to normal (no ethernet jump)
- Boot manager mode back to normal
- Security Menu back to normal with my admin PWD recognized (!!!)
I saw an update from the iBridge OS.
Now I have one remaining issue: my Catalina boot USB is not yet recognized. In Recovery mode, I got a strange error telling, it cannot boit from it cause not AFPS.
But if USB formatted in AFPS create install cannot work (I tried).
I restarted the entire process (download from Apple store the image of 8.1GB, create install, restart with option key) and still USB not recognized!
If I ask jumping from the Catalina installer using the Start up menu from the OS, I got the AFPS error message...
I use to make USB installer for all OSs so I am not missing a step unless something new needed.
I still would like to have the USB ready to be used.
Tomorrow I will try it in another Mac still in Mojave...
