“Erase All Content and Settings” failure “No owner was found”

[bogdanw]

I don’t use “Erase All Content and Settings” on my Macs, but I use it sometimes in virtual machines and it can lead to catastrophic failure

After initiating “Erase All Content and Settings”, the messsage “No owner was found” is displayed on reboot, then “There are no users on this volume to recover” and “Erase Mac Failed” when trying to reinstall from Recovery.

Images from a Tahoe virtual machine, but I’ve seen the same in other macOS versions as well.

 

[Brian33]

@bogdanw , you would make a great software tester in quality assurance at Apple! They should hire you. : )