Every so often you will likely find yourself in a situation where you need to completely reset and restore your Mac (which is why I keep hounding people to perform Mac backups regularly) . It could be because of a problem, or just because you want a clean slate with a fresh macOS installation. However, sometimes, when you’re in the Mac recovery mode trying to install macOS, you will see a “recovery server could not be contacted” error. If that’s happening to you, don’t worry, here’s how to fix macOS “recovery server could not be contacted” error.

There are multiple possible solutions for this error. In this article, I will go through all of those methods, from the easiest to the most time consuming ones you can use. There are links to each method below to make it easier for you to get to the solution you want to try.

  • Fix Recovery Server Could Not be Contacted During macOS Recovery
  • Check Your Network Connection
  • Correct System Time and Date Manually
  • Install macOS from a Bootable USB
  • Fix “Recovery Server Could Not be Contacted” Error During macOS Update
  • Update Your System Time and Sync It With Apple’s Servers
  • Install macOS Using Apple’s ‘softwareupdate’ Terminal Command
  • Install macOS Using MacAdmin Scripts

Fix Recovery Server Could Not be Contacted During macOS Recovery

Check Your Network Connection

This might sound like a fairly obvious thing to do, but sometimes you will see that you aren’t connected to WiFi when you are trying to restore your Mac. Doing this is simple.

If you are, and you’re still getting the error, move on to the next step.

One of the most common reasons your Mac may be unable to download the macOS installer is because of time and date differences. This happens quite often when you are in recovery mode, and it’s also a possibility if you are running macOS in a virtual machine. Fortunately, the fix is simple.

date

date mmddhhssyy

date 1208154720

Try installing macOS again from the recovery and it should work.

Install macOS from a Bootable USB

If nothing seems to be working, you will need to install macOS using a bootable USB drive. This process requires a considerable amount of work on your part, but it’s not difficult. All you need is a USB flash drive with at least 16GB storage and a Mac that you can use to download the version of macOS you want to install.

Sometimes the “recovery server could not be contacted” error pops up when you’re simply trying to update your Mac to a newer version of macOS. In those situations, you can try the following steps instead.

One of the most common reasons your Mac may be unable to download the macOS installer is because of time and date differences. Fortunately, the fix is simple.

If you are not using macOS Mojave or newer on your Mac, do the following.

ntpdate -u time.apple.com

Note: If the command doesn’t work, try giving yourself superuser rights with the following command.

For Macs running macOS Mojave or later

sntp -sS time.apple.com

Note: Once again, if you get a “Operation not permitted” error, run the command with sudo, as shown below.

Install macOS Using Apple’s ‘softwareupdate’ Terminal Command

You can also try installing macOS using terminal commands thanks to Apple’s built in “softwareupdate” command.

For example, if you want to update to macOS Big Sur, you can use macOS_version as 11.0.1 as shown below

Otherwise, you can also simply upgrade to the latest version of macOS available by using the following command

If you’re stuck updating macOS because of the buggy command that Apple officially supports, there’s another neat way to use the terminal and update your Mac.

  • If you don’t know how to get to /Users/shared/, just open Finder and press command + shift + G. Now, type in /Users/shared and hit the Return key.

  • Paste the downloaded zip file here and extract it.

  • Now, launch the Terminal and type in the following command

  • cd /Users/shared/macadmin-scripts-main/

cd /Users/shared/macadmin-scripts-main/

sudo ./installinstallmacos.py