Mac A1707 No recovery mode

[scrubey]

Hello all,

Wondered if anyone had experienced a similar issue to this.

I have an A1707 which cannot enter recovery mode.
When trying to access recovery mode (cmd+r) I get an Apple logo and no progress bar. It hangs on this screen indefinitely.

When trying to access internet recovery mode (option+cmd+r or shift+option+cmd+r) I get the same screen. No spinning globe. This is regardless of whether I have an ethernet cable connected or not.

Interestingly, the same behaviour is seen when trying to boot apple diagnostics.

I have been able to completely erase the drive and reinstall macos using a bootable USB. I have tried both Monterey and Sierra (the MacOS the system shipped with) and both have this issue.

I suspect something has been corrupted but I'm not entirely sure what and where. My only guess would be something in the EFI partition as that seems to have persisted across reinstalls of MacOS as I once had refind installed and its directory within EFI persisted.

Any ideas?

EDIT:

To add, the system can boot into MacOS perfectly fine, no issues whatsoever.

[scrubey]

Re: Mac A1707 No recovery mode

Update:

For anyone who finds this in the future and is trying to fix their device with similar issues, the problem is now fixed.

I'm not entirely sure what fixed it though.
At the same time as this I was also experiencing this issue https://www.badcaps.net/forum/showthread.php?t=116999 with my mac. Where I had replaced a damaged screen but the replacement i recevied was faulty and didnt display at the resolution required for the option boot menu. This made this whole thing tricky as I had to have it connected to an external display in order to boot recovery mode - which didnt actually boot.

However, I managed to get refind installed - which was difficult as I couldn't disable SIP.
To do this, I used the following command

sudo ./refind-install --usedefault /dev/disk0s1

which installed it to the EFI partition but did not bless it, as that required SIP disabled. I then booted into the boot menu and chose "EFI BOOT" to access refind. I then used refind to boot the recovery partition. This booted.
So holding cmd+r at startup did not boot recovery, but refind did.

The day after, my new replacement screen arrived, so I swapped that in. Cmd+r now works to boot recovery mode.
I don't know whether replacing the screen with a fully working one was the solution or whether installing refind was (I had previously installed refind before replacing the screen for the first time).