I have a friend’s daughter’s 2018 MacBook Air (Intel, obviously), that I erased in an attempt to set it up for her ‘as new’. I rebooted after erasing it, assuming I could boot from my bootable flash drive with Sonoma on it. Well, now all it offers, no matter what I try, is Internet Recovery, and every time I get to the end of that slow process, I get the triangle with an exclamation point, “support.apple.com/mac/startup” and the error code -1008F.
I’ve tried all manner of keyboard shortcuts at bootup: just the Option key, ⌘-R, ⌘-⌥-Shift-R, and none at all. I’ve tried two different wifi networks (I have several in my house) and ethernet.
Anyone have any suggestions, or have I simply bricked this thing?
P.S. I’m thinking I probably should’ve changed the security settings before I wiped it; is that right? Is it too late now? Sigh…
This says you may be ok if you use Option-Command-R (without the Shift), but it may well be that you are being blocked the Activation Lock. In which case the Support article is: Activation Lock for Mac – Apple Support (AU)
Could you or Adam please change the title so we can easily find it in future - the tips and links from Gilby are very useful.
Maybe “Before you erase an Intel Mac check this experience”
Sorry, really good point. Looks like Adam already changed it. Thanks @ace!
FYI, I got the daughter to remove the laptop from her account, but I’m still getting the same error. Interestingly, however, first, in trying to turn off Find My, and then when I had her remove the machine via System Settings->Apple ID on her new machine, she encountered “unexpected errors”. Not sure if that’s playing a role as well.
I’ve sure learned a lesson here, regarding newer T2-based models, as well as all the M-series. In my experience, Apple has done a good job creating a process that avoids issues like this on M-series models at least…