Debugging Hell

I’ve dealt with a conundrum for the past 72 hours. My TouchID key had seemed to stopped working on my ’17 MacBook Pro. That meant a few difficult things:

1. No powering off the machine
2. No powering on the machine
3. No forcing it into recovery mode
4. No resetting of the SMC
5. No resetting of the PVRAM

The only way of doing anything was waiting for the battery to die enough to fresh-boot and try something, whatever it was. Otherwise the login screen would deny every attempt. Also, every re-install attempt would result in the infamous The recovery server could not be contacted. Which from the logs seemed to be a legit timeout combined with an unexpected (but correct) disk format. I was about to throw it out the window, slamming on it on the desk. Too many people had seen the same errors before.

But after a trip to Lowe’s to retrieve the (almost) correct drivers I was able to disconnect the battery internally. So now, powering it on, just meant plugging it in. So finally, after a few attempts at making a bootable installer, it’s back up and running. TouchID and all working-fine. Pentalobe != Torx.

It took hours. But it’s back in its humble state; ready for Zooms and rudimentary Java experiments.