how to wipe a locked t2 MacBook by booting it into DFUmode, yes it can be done but first, why would you want to do this well let’s say You’re a recycler or a refurbish or receive a MacBook pro 2018 that previous owner or company failed to properly log out or remove the password as they should. This happens a lot with laptops in general. The thing is with these machines, unlike previous MacBooks you can’t just boot them to an external drive to wipe them or go into a recovery mode and wipe them that way. As you can see in the startup security utility MacBook which you can access in recovery mode the default setting is to disallow booting from external drives you have to change the option to do that and since t2 Macs have no removable drive it just ships on the board you can’t even use the tried-and-true option of removing and wiping the drive. If you can’t figure out how to wipe the embedded drive that you’re stuck.
Sometimes updating the MacBook you get corrupted and leave the machine unresponsive state. Apple released this software and document showing how to boot the machine into DFU mode in order to wipe it and restore functionality.
What they don’t tell you is that this method can be used to wipe a working machine and that also erases user accounts and firmware passwords which is great news.
As long as the machine is not activation locked this method will completely restore a password or for a locked machine to full usability it will also allow you to wipe an activation locked machine however it won’t complete the restore without a password so it will end up with a blank Drive and a laptop.
Supported devices
This task covers the following Apple computers:
- iMac Pro
- Mac mini (2018) or later
- Mac Pro (2019)
- MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2018, Four Thunderbolt 3 Ports) or later
- MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2018) or later
- MacBook Air (Retina, 13-inch, 2018) or later
Learn how to wipe the drives of locked MacBooks using DFU mode, as shown in Apple documentation
Revive iOS/iPadOS Devices without losing user data using Apple Configurator 2