Things that may "brick" your 2018 MacBook Pro

[tekfranz]

Doing some research on Recovery Tools in Carbon Copy Cloner...Anyone try restoring from a CCC clone on a bricked mac?

 

[_Kiki_]

sounds more like closed ecosystem, I wouldn't buy next MBP with T2 chip

 

[AndyIbanez]

I thought it was worth mentioning this here.

I deleted all the partitions and formatted my 2019 MBP's hard drive without knowing anything about the implications of T2 and secure boot.

While I wasn't able to boot from my Catalina Installer USB, I was able to boot into internet recovery mode and continue the installation from there. You cannot disable secure boot once you formatted your Mac, but you can continue the installation from internet recovery without an issue.

So if you find yourself having the same problem, internet recovery will reinstall the OS without an issue. It was just a bummer for me because my Wi-Fi is unreliable, and my Ethernet adapter doesn't work on my Mac unless I install the drivers, so I had to deal with a really bad connection.

 

[boris.minakov]

Dear All,
After 12 hours of trouble shooting, I am going to post solution, which worked for me on 3 bricked MAC Book Pro 2018 / 2019 with T2 chip

How MAC can be bricked:

1) You have secure boot set to enabled
2) You have disable external boot set to enabled

3) You try to reinstall MAC and Wipe whole disk (including recovery partition)


Now you have:

a) No USB can be booted
b) No Command + R (or any other recovery) combination will work, because recovery partition is wiped
c) Internet recovery fails with error -1008F / -2009F (or any other), suppose because of secure boot enabled

Now the only one and 100% working solution is:

1) You need working MAC Book, better if it will be the same like a bricked one
2) You need thunderbolt Cable version 3 USB-C to USB-C (or you may also need version 2)
Cable is needed to connect 2 MAC (bricked one and working one with Thunderbolt high speed cable)

If both mac books have type C so thunderbolt Cable version 3 is ok, if one of them does not have type C you may need additional converter like USB to USB C ..., Whole idea is to connect MACs with cable

3) Shutdown brick MAC Book, when it is completely power off, touch and hold only "T" button
After 15 seconds bricked mac book will start in "Target disk mode"

4) After you will see this mac as a external hard drive in your second working MAC

5) Now on working MAC download "Carbon Copy Cloner 5" this is HDD imaging tool (Its free for 30 Days, so its ok for us to make work done)

6) This step is not necessary but i like to do it just in case. Using disk utility, format external HDD and erase all partitions on it (of course before erase you will be asked to un-mount it and this is normal)
This step is not required because after Carbon Cloner will do the job again...

7) Run Carbon Cloner App, and point
source disk - Your Working MAC HDD
destination disk - Your external HDD (bricked mac book disk in target disk mode)

8) Run clone and wait till 100% completion

9) Working MAC operating system including recovery partition will be cloned

10) Disconnect thunderbolt cable and restart bricked MAC

11) Mac will boot normally and will have full working clone of working MAC

10) Now you can restart and go to command + R in recovery mode and do what ever you like again

This method was tested on 3 different MAC Book Pro, currently all had USB C in my case