Sweet Apple MacBook M1

I am not an apple fan/boy. I mean, I get it. They provide this unique and friendly ecosystem of products that now are consolidating under one hardware architecture. But along those changes, their OS also changes too. On previous jobs I used the iMac 4K 27 inch display. They used intel and they were nice. And working on those machines is pretty sweet! I think it was macOS Catalina?

Personally I own an ASUS gaming machine with windows, I mostly use it for gaming! But I can tell that many workflows change and maintaining the code can have slight differences on either OS. Which was the brand new macOS BigSur meant for the apple silicon systems that they were releasing.

just use docker!

Yeah! We did! An amazing guy setted up our dev-ops and I never managed to run some bash scripts on my docker windows container.

insertSadFace.webp

Anyways, run forward to last week and I've just got a brand new Macbook Air M1. I remember that Big Sur brought some aesthetic and GUI changes overall. But I had no issue getting use the the machine...

Until I decided to do a factory reset and deleted the disk.

Never delete the disk

Usually, or at least it's how I used to do this. I would delete everything from the disk. And do a fresh install of the OS. Yeah, ok. But why?! You might be asking yourselves. And well, I do this when I want to sell it. Or I usually leave the company so I hand all the work and I do a factory reset. This time I just needed to do it because "work reasons". So, when I tried to do the fresh install of the OS I came with an odd looking message:

No users available for authorization.

What?...

I have never encountered this before. So I decided to do a google research, and things started to look dark.

Some dude on Reddit said:

M1 machiens have a known issue with Restoring. Basically, it doesn't work.

Link to reddit thread

Holy fudge, I almost flipped and after some digging and one and a half hour of cold sweating; I managed to fix it like this:
(I had around 4 hours to solve it before I met with the IT security officer to see some features I needed)

Solution to this

1. Start up in Recovery Mode
2. From the Utilities Open the terminal
3. In the terminal run resetpassword
4. This will prompt you to a screen where it tells you there are no users.
5. On the bottom part there should be an option for Delete Mac (You can also select this option from the task bar).
6. After it reboots the Recovery Utility open the Disk Utility.
7. Create a new Volume. (My default vas called Untitled)
8. Delete the old volume. (The one that was created by default)
9. Now you can reinstall your OS.

After thoughts

I haven't felt like that in some time. And oh boy, Apple did it again! Getting this workaround took me some time and if I didn't have previous experience this would had been a gruesome situation. Other solutions involved creating volumes, using other devices to install the OS. I even tried doing the OS install using the terminal but it also failed with weird errors!

I felt so relieved when the OS started to download and the authorization user error was gone. I hope this solution fits any of you useful! If you got any similar issues I would love to read them! Also any comments or suggestions are more than welcome!