Wtf am I looking at? I tried to boot from USB, but I'm guessing this is not that. Is this like a Mac recovery mode?
I'm not an Apple person, I just want to install BSD lol
@gordoooo_z
AFAIR these Macs had the option to download the image of recovery partition from Apple's severs if it's not found on the hard drive. Question is, how does it connect to the Internet? If you ever configured wireless network in Mac OS X, it saves the ssid and key to EFI, so it's probably using that.
@gordoooo_z @m0xee Internet recovery mode doesn’t require macOS to be installed on the computer at all. I think you might need to use recovery mode to set the default boot disk if it’s being wired(See links in other reply)
@gordoooo_z
Not sure when such an option was introduced, but it might not 😁
The EFI part itself can make a recovery partition, download the recovery image — which is relatively small as it doesn't include complete OS installation files and restore it on the partition it has created.
So it might work even with no OS at all, basically with a blank hard drive.
It then proceeds to reboot from that recovery partition, downloads OS installation files and you can re-install the OS normally.
@gordoooo_z
At least that is how it was supposed to work, I'm not sure when this Internet recovery thing was introduced even, AFAIK, my 2011 MBP can't do it, but I had an iMac from the same era in the office and I tried it once — it worked!
@m0xee First thing it showed was a dropdown to select my SSID. This thing hasn't had OS X installed in quite some time. Original drive was on its way out so I swapped in a 250GB drive and put Linux on it, but then just placed it on the shelf lol.
Anyway, it finished downloading, then booted back into Linux. I assume this feature expects a working Mac OS installed?