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Recently my Mac crashed due to kernel panic. I tried using disk utility to repair the disk but the parent disk couldn't be repaired. And I opened up the terminal and erased the current boot disk. And after that the terminal couldn't execute anymore as I guess the resources for the terminal was deleted when I erased the disk.

Now am stuck up. Internet recovery won't work maybe because the SSD isn't formatted in apple compatible format. And I was wondering if there's any way we could load disk utility or any other disk repair tool from USB so that I could repair the main SSD of the MacBook into a compatible disk for reinstallation of macos

Sonam Wangdi Lepcha
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    Internet recovery is designed for situations when the disk doesn't work. What model of iMac is this? – benwiggy Aug 30 '20 at 12:07
  • If your model Mac is capable of Internet Recovery, have a look at How to reinstall macOS from macOS Recovery as Disk Utility is available from there. – user3439894 Aug 30 '20 at 15:27
  • If you have access to another Mac you can create a macOS installer onto a USB key. Personally I use DiskMakerX (free!) to make bootable installers. When you boot from the installer it asks you to set the language then you can use Disk Utility from the tools menu (if I remember correctly) to run a repair on the disk. Just make sure you make an installer for the same version that is installed to avoid things not working right. – Steve Chambers Aug 30 '20 at 16:08
  • There seems to be a lot missing here between the kernel panic and erasing the drive. 1) a kernel panic isn’t always caused by a drive issue so how did you come to that conclusion? 2) what happened that the disk couldn’t be repaird? What errors did you encounter? 3) How did you “open terminal to erase the drive?” You can’t simply open Terminal and with diskutil unmount the boot volume. 4) What did Internet Recovery do or not do to say “it won’t work?” – Allan Aug 30 '20 at 17:04
  • Well Allan, my Mac started rebooting in a loop and sometimes it would load and we'll sometimes it wouldn't. And I started searching for the solution adm I found in many places that repairing the drive through disk utility solved most of the problems. Prior to this solution I did reset the NVRAM, SMC to see if that could sove the problem. But nothing did, so I tried repairing the drive using disk utility in recovery mode and there seemed to be problem with the Hard drive so I tried repair but it would not work. – Sonam Wangdi Lepcha Aug 31 '20 at 13:50
  • So I got to the terminal through recovery mode and used diskutil tool to repair the disk and I repaired the drive but at the same time I happened to erase the entire disk and the drive was no more shown in the disk utility. And the terminal wouldn't work anymore, so I turned of the laptop and restarted to see if I could launch the recovery tools, but I couldn't. So as of now am working on to load internet recovery. The progress bar gets full after couple of hrs and restarts, but then am stuck with stop symbol. – Sonam Wangdi Lepcha Aug 31 '20 at 13:54
  • And it was because of the kernel panic because I could see it in the error log – Sonam Wangdi Lepcha Aug 31 '20 at 13:55

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A macOS installer environment includes Disk Utility. You can create an install USB using createinstallmedia and a downloaded copy of macOS. For example, for Catalina, you can run:

sudo /Applications/Install\ macOS\ Catalina.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/MyVolume

How to create a bootable installer for macOS - Apple Support

n.b. Internet Recovery should work regardless of hard drive, even without one at all, since it is loaded into RAM from an internet connection.

At0micMutex
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grg
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  • They can't download the installer app and create a bootable installer if they haven't got a working OS. And Internet Recovery should work because it is 'stored in Firmware', not because it is 'loaded in RAM'. – benwiggy Aug 30 '20 at 12:11
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    @benwiggy The lack of another computer wasn't specified in the question, I don't think it's an unreasonable assumption to make. The ability to perform Internet Recovery is a firmware feature, but the environment is downloaded and run from mounted volumes stored in RAM which is why a disk isn't necessary. – grg Aug 30 '20 at 12:15
  • Thanks. I got a copy of MacOs Mojave DMG file and made a bootable USB to install the OS. I made it bootable through transmac software in windows as I don't have access to another macbook but after I try to boot the laptop by pressing and holding the option key after powering up, the USB device is not shown only the internet recovery. What should I do? – Sonam Wangdi Lepcha Aug 31 '20 at 14:25