This actually happened to me a few days ago with the exact same machine - 2017 MacBook 12". I was erasing it for my daughter's use, and High Sierra was all that was available to me via Internet Recovery.
I get High Sierra on that Mac by doing Shift-Command-Option-R, which is the NEW startup modifier combo (since 10.12.4) for booting the oldest available OS for a given Mac. When I do Command-Option-R, I get Catalina, where I was previously getting version 11.0.1 of Big Sur.
In fact, Internet Recovery was actually behaving badly for a while... it got stuck on the spinning globe for 8+ hours!
Ultimately, I did do fresh install via a USB installer with 11.1. But I think that is "level 2"-type resolution and I wish Apple would fix whatever was causing the problem.
I agree. It seems like this started around the time of 11.1's release. As though Apple replaced the Internet Recovery image for 11.0.1 with 10.15.7 instead of one for 11.1 like they should've. This doesn't seem like an issue with our hardware, but rather something on Apple's back-end. I'm kind of wondering where I should direct my complaint to. It'd be one thing if I cared to install Catalina on anything that didn't already have it, but really, doesn't do anything for me at this point (I'd much rather be on either Big Sur or Mojave).
Not everyone is going to have a USB drive handy, and even creating a USB installer has a few quirks/tricks that I'm sure Apple would prefer to avoid. Which is why Internet Recovery is so useful. Once you get to the screen, it's (typically) hard for things to go wrong.
I completely agree. When I'm working an IT job in a Mac environment, having a USB stick is great when dealing with pre-T2 Macs that I don't want to change security settings for. Similarly, with Apple Silicon Macs settings being on a per OS container basis rather than being system-wide, having a USB stick is great then too. But when it's a one-off and I'm trying to just get one machine ready for eBay or one machine restored to the latest, I don't want to have to sacrifice a thumb drive, especially if I'm not installing an older OS release (i.e. Mojave). Like, give me my express ticket to 11.1 please.
First, make sure that all volumes and containers on the disk are unmounted. I have worked around this problem by changing the partition options and selecting HFS+ and then reformatting as APFS or by selecting MBR and FAT as the partition and formatting options and then selecting GUID/APFS.
Did that. Again, I was never given an error. It's that clicking the button literally does nothing. Doesn't even dismiss the dialogue window either. Again, I do not have this issue in the recovery modes of either High Sierra, Mojave, or Big Sur. This seems to be another Catalina-ism.
Hey can you take a look at
This thread ? Did I described the same issue as you ?
Yup. Exact same issue. As soon as I saw it happening on an Early 2013 Air also, I realized that it wasn't limited to the 2017 MacBook, let alone MY 2017 MacBook. I'm wondering if it's happening on Intel Macs that shipped following Big Sur's release. I'll be ordering one of those in a few days...
i have an old 250gb laptop drive.....partitioned it in 3 parts, and put big sur, catalina and mojave installers on each partition. that drive stay "always there" (what else could it be usefull for
? )
for creating the installer I use install disk creator, which is the simplest software on the planet. just choose the source installer (downloaded from apple) and the target partition of the usb-attached drive.....
What’s needed for a clean install on a Mac A backup of the disk before it’s erased. Two options are to use Duplicate (a free utility which can copy and paste an entire bootable volume), or Mac Backup Guru (a paid, fully featured backup utility with unique incremental backups capability) for...
macdaddy.io
time required: 1 minute to take the drive out of the box and connect it to mac + 20 minutes to download the installer (this depends obviously on your internet speed) + 5 minutes to create the installer with that software.
I can do this every time I feel to update the single installers and why I am doing other thing.....If apple servers are slow no problem.....but when I have my disks everything is ready, without problems.....
Internet recovery....no thanks.....download could be slow.....or stop for whatever reason......
But, of course, Is is just my opinion......
Honestly, Internet Recovery has never been super slow for me. At least, not in recent years. I used to make USB drives for each release and then I just stopped because Internet Recovery was way more convenient. Plus, I much more prefer createinstallmedia.
Again, it's more that (a) I'm doing these as one-offs (as these are my home computers and not machines I deploy as part of an IT department to users [in which case, I'd 10000% prefer a USB stick to Internet Recovery {save for maybe T2 Macs where I don't want to weaken system-wide security settings just to shave time loading an OS}]) and (b) I don't have all of the USB sticks in the world. Plus, (c) I've made the multi-OS USB sticks before; they're fun and way nice to have, though tedious to maintain.
Were I loading Big Sur in bulk on more than three machines, I'd ABSOLUTELY 10000% go the USB route. Though, I'd probably make multiple drives.
I don’t think a download installer works in perpetuity. I think Apple blocks ones that are older than a few weeks. Which means you’re downloading again which isn’t a lot different than internet recovery.
Apple blocks them on T2 Macs after a bit. Lowering System Security Utility settings is the way around this, but I'm not the most jazzed about doing that on T2 Macs. On Apple Silicon Macs where it's per OS container, that I'm totally cool with. But even so, it's not like my 10.7.4 installer from forever ago, will still work. They have certificates on these installers and they do eventually expire and need to be renewed. While i'd love for the one mega drive that contains the latest installer for every major Mac OS release since they stopped doing DVDs, I'd HATE maintaining that thing and updating it every time Apple made some kind of a back-end change. That's largely why I stopped collecting installers to begin with.
