I fixed my M4 Mac Mini (LED blinking orange) without another Mac

[Larsenv]

Today I hard rebooted my Mac and I had found that the LED that's on the front of it was blinking orange. Turns out it was in firmware recovery mode

Thought I would give a pointer to anyone who is faced with this issue.

I sold my other Mac recently, so what I did is use my Dell Thin client...

Here's briefly what I did with the thin client

1. I flashed Fedora Linux to my flash drive using balenaetcher
2. I rebooted the computer, getting into the BIOS to change the boot order
3. I git cloned the repository for idevicerestore. I did not use a binary version, as it does not support M4 Mac Mini
4. I had to manually Git clone several repositories, run autogen.sh, make, and then sudo make install for each of them. I found which ones I had to install as I went along
5. I also had to install multiple packages with dnf, which I had to change the path for the cache (I was using a live version). I had to plug in another memory device
6. I had to keep the Mac in the firmware recovery whrre the light is flashing orange, then I ran idevicerestore. It began to download the IPSW
7. However, since there was no space to put the cache, I had to use my memory device to store the IPSW then run idevicerestore on that
8. It did its magic... then
9. profit

I don't want to write a whole tutorial just for this, but I hope that this helps someone. It took quite some time to do this. This isn't for the faint of heart