What's Mac OS X Recovery Assistant? How to Fully Erase Mac with It?

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I’m in desperate need of erasing a Mac and reinstalling macOS. It’s been down for several days and I’ve tried various ways to erase the internal hard drive to no avail because I don’t have the admin password and can’t boot the Mac into Recovery Mode. Finally, I saw somebody suggesting that one can erase a Mac using the Mac OS X Recovery Assistant but there are no details. Searching for “Mac OS X Recovery Assistant” in Google only results in information about OS X Recovery Disk Assitant, which I assume isn’t the same thing. Please help me erase my Mac without a password.

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Mac OS X Recovery Assistant vs. OS X Recovery Disk Assitant

You’re right to assume they are different.

OS X Recovery Disk Assistant is a tool for creating a Lion or Mountain Lion external Recovery drive that has the same ability as the built-in OS X Recovery, in case a Mac crashes and won’t restart. Basically, it creates an external Lion or Mountain Lion bootable USB.

Mac OS X Recovery Assistant or Recovery Assistant, however, is the app that handles the authentication in macOS Recovery.

Since macOS Catalina, Apple started to require authentication for accessing macOS Recovery. If your Mac has FileVault or Activation Lock enabled, the administrator’s password is required to enter Recovery mode.

Although Recovery Assistant mainly deals with authentication and password resets, it can also erase your Mac without a password.

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Very clear explanations! Thx! How do I erase my Mac with the Recovery Assistant then?

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I happen to know this. Follow the steps below to erase your Mac with Mac OS X Recovery Assistant:

Warning: Recovery Assistant performs a full erase, which removes everything on your Mac, including files, apps, user data, settings, and the OS itself.

Supported devices: Any Mac running macOS Catalina or later

  1. Boot into Mac Recovery Mode.

Intel-based Macs: Power off the Mac, turn it on, then immediately press and hold Command-R until the Apple logo and a progress bar appear.

Apple Silicon Macs: Turn off the Mac, press and hold the power button until you see a message reading “Loading startup options,” then choose Options > Continue.

  1. On the top-left corner, select Recovery Assistant > Erase Mac.
  2. Follow the instructions to erase your Mac and reinstall macOS.

There are also other ways to reset your Mac without a password. If the steps above don’t work, check out this guide: How to Factory Reset MacBook Pro/Air without Password or Apple ID?

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