Apple provides instructions to erase and restore unresponsive M1 Macs
Apple has released two sets of instructions to perform an erase and restore on an Apple Silicon Mac or MacBook, roughly a week after users encountered issues performing a similar procedure intended for Intel-based Macs.
The M1-equipped MacBook Air
There are occasions where a Mac may not work properly, to the level that the Mac or MacBook won't boot up at all, such as if a power cut is performed during an upgrade of macOS. Apple has procedures in place that can enable users to revive the firmware of the Mac, to allow it to boot and function normally.
However, over the last week, users who have needed to revive the new M1-equipped Mac mini, MacBook Air, and 13-inch MacBook Pro were encountering problems going through the same process, with Apple Configurator 2 throwing up errors in some situations.
Apple has now updated its instructions for dealing with a restoration of a Mac with separate details specifically for the M1 Macs. Like the Intel version, the Apple Silicon variant still requires Apple Configurator 2 installed on a secondary Mac, as well as supported USB-C and USB-A cables for charging and data transfer, and for users to configure their web proxy and firewall ports to allow all network traffic to work with Apple's network.
The instructions largely break down to launching Apple Configurator 2 on the secondary Mac, connecting the two Macs together, restarting the non-functional Mac using a special key sequence, then using Configurator 2 to revive or restore the firmware and recoveryOS. Options are also available to erase the Mac completely and reinstall macOS from scratch.
While the main instructions will be usable by the majority of M1 Mac users, a second set deals with a specific "personalization error" that may appear. According to Apple, the error appears if you erased the M1 Mac before updating to macOS Big Sur 11.0.1, which may prompt the message "An error occurred while preparing the update. Failed to personalize the software update. Please try again."
In this particular situation, Apple primarily suggests using a secondary Mac and an external storage device to create a bootable installer. There is a secondary set of instructions for users who do not have the first option available to them.
The second version involves going through the startup options and accessing the Terminal, before undertaking a series of steps involving copying commands from a support page and pasting them into Terminal before running them. If the more involved instructions do not work, the page advises customers to contact Apple Support directly.
At present, it isn't clear how many customers are having the problem. Service departments contacted by AppleInsider over the weekend and on November 23 have only seen a very small handful of cases.
The M1-equipped MacBook Air
There are occasions where a Mac may not work properly, to the level that the Mac or MacBook won't boot up at all, such as if a power cut is performed during an upgrade of macOS. Apple has procedures in place that can enable users to revive the firmware of the Mac, to allow it to boot and function normally.
However, over the last week, users who have needed to revive the new M1-equipped Mac mini, MacBook Air, and 13-inch MacBook Pro were encountering problems going through the same process, with Apple Configurator 2 throwing up errors in some situations.
Apple has now updated its instructions for dealing with a restoration of a Mac with separate details specifically for the M1 Macs. Like the Intel version, the Apple Silicon variant still requires Apple Configurator 2 installed on a secondary Mac, as well as supported USB-C and USB-A cables for charging and data transfer, and for users to configure their web proxy and firewall ports to allow all network traffic to work with Apple's network.
The instructions largely break down to launching Apple Configurator 2 on the secondary Mac, connecting the two Macs together, restarting the non-functional Mac using a special key sequence, then using Configurator 2 to revive or restore the firmware and recoveryOS. Options are also available to erase the Mac completely and reinstall macOS from scratch.
While the main instructions will be usable by the majority of M1 Mac users, a second set deals with a specific "personalization error" that may appear. According to Apple, the error appears if you erased the M1 Mac before updating to macOS Big Sur 11.0.1, which may prompt the message "An error occurred while preparing the update. Failed to personalize the software update. Please try again."
In this particular situation, Apple primarily suggests using a secondary Mac and an external storage device to create a bootable installer. There is a secondary set of instructions for users who do not have the first option available to them.
The second version involves going through the startup options and accessing the Terminal, before undertaking a series of steps involving copying commands from a support page and pasting them into Terminal before running them. If the more involved instructions do not work, the page advises customers to contact Apple Support directly.
At present, it isn't clear how many customers are having the problem. Service departments contacted by AppleInsider over the weekend and on November 23 have only seen a very small handful of cases.
Comments
This possibility has existed for every Mac (at least since Mac OS X?) and it's incredibly rare. I expect it's incredibly rare with these new Macs. But if you're the one in 10,000 who bought a new Mac and then f'ed it up, you want a knowledge article about how to get it restored. Now that article is available.
A power cut during an upgrade doesn't occur that often, and in a home setup would be pretty difficult to guard against. I had something similar years ago while we were upgrading a Windows server. One of the developers managed to pull the power lead (several actually, since he tripped and managed to break a finger) during the upgrade and the system was completely shafted. I think it took us most of the day and all night to get thing up and running again.
After that we stopped hosting the service ourselves.
Like any probabilistic assessment, there is always a possibility that the probability of failure occurrence in the field exceeds the estimates factored into their cost-benefit analysis. We will see, but don't assume that Apple is flying by the seat of their pants and just hoping to get lucky. They've engineered this product, assessed the reliability, and made data driven choices based on what they knew at the time. If they find a gap or failed assumption, I'm sure they will take corrective action.
As a user I'm a big fan of "rollback to last known good state" recovery mechanisms at various levels, including firmware. I've worked with products that do this and as a developer I can tell you that it is not a trivial exercise because it invariably introduces another vector for security exploitation, just like exception handlers in software systems open up opportunities for exploitation. All those divide-by-zero and buffer over/under -flows that programmers are taught to avoid aren't inherently security issues by themselves if the simply produce bad results, but the exception/crash processing that results from them provides a known way for the bad guys to hook in their code.
Rolling back to factory defaults is less concerning, but every control single path needs to be heavily scrutinized, especially all of the unhappy paths.
Also, there is no Internet Recovery on the M1 Macs - I hope this comes back in the future, as it's handy when all else fails. At some point, there has to be a way to bring a machine back from such a situation that doesn't rely on having another recent Mac around to run Configurator 2 on.
I did not know that. Can a USB installer be created on a thumb or other external drive as with prior OSs?