I’d try to boot something like the ubuntu installer and use dd... My oldest macbook pro stopped taking macos updates, so it runs ubuntu now - but i forget which installer image used to do that. M -- Matt Billenstein matt@vazor.com
On Jul 8, 2020, at 11:14 PM, Yury V. Zaytsev <yury@shurup.com> wrote:
On Wed, 8 Jul 2020, matt@vazor.com wrote:
Boot from a usb installer image and you can clear the disk and install to it.
Of course, I've tried that already with an USB installer for Catalina (APFS support) and El Capitan (pre-APFS) - both installers panic on boot while probing local hardware because as soon as they find the disk and try to read the partition table something goes kaboom.
Internet Recovery leads to the same results, because basically it's just another delivery way for the installer, but as soon as it starts booting were're at square one.
Is there some way to zero the first blocks of the drive from EFI :) ? Like in the old good days when Sun still shined, I could enter OpenBoot by pressing the magic "Stop-A" button and enter the Forth interpreter to do stuff like that...
-- Sincerely yours, Yury V. Zaytsev