I have to re-intall macOS Catalina on my Mac Mini 2018. SSD was worn out.
Trial 1: Web Restoration (Alt + Shift + Cmd + R or Alt + R)
All seems to be good till: macOS couldn’t be put in in your pc
Working Apple Diagnostic (clearly?) leads to: No points discovered.
Rebooting and retrying the set up then all the time (regardless of what number of instances I strive) results in: macOS couldn’t be put in in your pc
Trial 2: USB key
From one other Mac, I downloaded Catalina and made a USB key:
softwareupdate -d --fetch-full-installer --full-installer-version 10.15.6
sudo /Purposes/Set up macOS Catalina.app/Contents/Sources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/UNTITLED
However, making an attempt to reboot on the USB key: Safety settings don’t permit this Mac to make use of an exterior startup disk.
And when making an attempt to alter the stated setting: No administrator was discovered.
Trial 3: dd
Sure, I even tried from the terminal to dump the USB set up key into the SSD, hoping it will reboot on it … however no, it ignores the SSD and restarts as a substitute on the Web Restoration mode.
Trial 4: Apple Time Machine
I did a Time Machine backup from the opposite Mac (macOS Monterey) to an exterior arduous drive. The Time Machine arduous drive is effectively acknowledged on the Mac Mini, however: No macOS system backups have been discovered.
I assume Apple Time Machine backs up solely the Knowledge partition from Monterey, not the OS partition …
I really feel trapped in an Apple loop: I can’t permit booting on USB as a result of the disk is clear with none administrator account, and I can’t create an administrator account as a result of I can’t set up macOS from an USB key.
Thanks upfront for any suggestion.
P.S.: SSD is soldered, so no choice right here to put in from a distinct pc.