Mac OS Recovery reinstall fails. Now what?

Alex Hare wrote:

I'm working with a 2011 iMac, which I've backed up and erased. I tried to use the Mac OS Recovery option to reinstall High Sierra, which failed. I've seen mentions that there's an SSL issue that might be at fault there.

Now I'm trying to get a bootable USB drive to reinstall the OS. The problem is that the only High Sierra I can download from the App Store to a 2017 Macbook Pro (with TouchBar) is a .dmg file for the update to 10.13.2, which doesn't have a copy of the sierra.app needed to work with Apple's instructions for making a bootable USB.

What other options are there at this point? I want to have a bootable OS on the machine before I donate it.

Try to follow this "Fix #3 Change the NVRAM Software Update URL" to the letter to install High Sierra. The final command will look like this:

nvram IASUCatalogURL="http://swscan.apple.com/content/catalogs/others/index-10.13-10.12-10.11-10.10-10.9-mountainlion-lion-snowleopard-leopard.merged-1.sucatalog"

https://mrmacintosh.com/how-to-fix-the-recovery-server-could-not-be-contacted-error-high-sierra-recovery-is-still-online-but-broken/

Find me any passkey on my device