trying to fresh install from bootable USB, getting Disk Utility Error -69877: Couldn't Open Device when erasing SSD

[bonfilio124]

Long story short, reinstalled Windows to do the steps to get the PowerPlayTables for my 6900XT for Monterey 12.3. Got that sorted fine so decided to make a clean reinstall of Monterey. Never had this error before and with googling I can't find any error references in regards to a hackintosh..

Disk Utility: Error -69877: Couldn't Open Device xxx

 

[BusterMachine]

If you are doing a clean install on a separate disk, you can try this... in Windows do a quick re-format of the disk (FAT or NTFS). Then boot into the macOS installer and use disk utility and re-format to APFS.

The other thing I can think of (while in the installers disk utility) is to un-mount the drive that has Monterey and all it's containers and see if you can erase or reformat it from there.

 

[bonfilio124]

Doing a deeper dive into this.. I must have something wrong in my config but I'm not sure what. All of my drives (NVME and external USB, don't have any SATA) are Not Writable in Disk Utility. I've tried a

DISKPART> attributes disk clear readonly

just to make sure those aren't set, everything appears fine. I can nuke (DISKPART> clean) and create partitions in Windows just fine, but nothing is working in Disk Utility.

 

[bonfilio124]

Doing a deeper deeper dive into this, I think Apple has done something sneaky and changed the recovery installer starting with 12.3. Pretty sure it's not my config after all.

Using an older Monterey recovery I have no problem nuking the Windows drive (I think the old one corresponds to 12.1 release but not 100% sure). With the new recovery downloaded post 12.3 release I can no longer format the Windows drive and I get an error. I tried installing Windows to one of my other drives and suddenly I can no longer reformat that drive either. No problems formatting a blank drive or a drive without an OS, but with an OS - at least Windows - no longer works. To make things more interesting, I CAN reformat an APFS drive with MacOS on it.

Is this an anti-hack move? Anyone else try a fresh recovery install recently?

In short..

12.1 recovery will reformat anything you throw at it.
12.3 recovery will reformat anything except an NTFS partition with a Windows install on it.