820-3023 - Replaced motherboard, new motherboard can not boot from APFS filesystems

[smiba]

Hey everyone,

Replaced a 820-3023 board for a customer with one I had around, everything was alright and good until I figured out it could not boot from the internal SSD.
If you boot a 10.13 recovery or installation it will happily see the APFS container and you're able to unlock it and browse around, but the EFI can not use it.

I assume somewhere through the update from 10.12 to 10.13 apple updated the BIOS/Boot ROM to support APFS. This motherboard has definitely been without owner for over a couple of months so there is no way its aware of APFS.
I already tried reinstalling 10.13 from recovery on a USB in the hope this would also apply the update, but after finishing the installation and rebooting I was greeted with the system just booting from the USB again as it could not see and use its just freshly installed OS X on a APFS partition.

What is the reason for this and what is the quickest way to teach the new motherboard on how to use APFS?

 

[dukefawks]

Installing 10.13 from USB like that is kind of a hack. I would assume that installing 10.12 and then updating to 13 will fix the issue.

 

[smiba]

Alright, I was just wondering if there was a quicker way.

The worst about this is that Internet Recovery installs OS X 10.7 by default, which can not upgrade to High Serria. (App stores says it requires 10.8 or higher to download). So I have to log in to my own iTunes account where I have a old installation on my purchases page of something like Yosemite to install that first.
If I knew this I would just have downloaded a OS X 10.9 ISO right away :\

 

[smiba]

Anyways installing 10.9 from a ISO and then updating to 10.13 caused the boot rom to get updated as well, its accepting the customer's SSD now.

Resolved, thanks!