How to Exit Recovery Mode on Mac

Recovery Mode is typically used for troubleshooting a Mac, for reinstalling system software, erasing disks, and performing similar tasks. Perhaps you’ve used recovery mode before to troubleshoot something, or perhaps you’ve even entered recovery mode accidentally on a Mac before. Rarely, a Mac just boots automatically into Recovery Mode constantly as well. Whatever the case, you may be wondering how to get out of and escape recovery mode on a Mac.

You will be relieved to know that exiting recovery mode on a Mac is incredibly simple.

Exiting Mac Recovery Mode by Restarting the Mac

All you need to do is restart the Mac to exit out of recovery mode.

You can initiate the restart from the  Apple menu and choosing “Restart”, or by holding down the Power button on the Mac to turn it off and back on again.

No matter what type of Mac it is, restarting the Mac will exit out of recovery mode.

This is obviously different from entering into recovery mode, which differs depending on the Mac chip architecture, requiring either holding the power button to boot into Recovery Mode on M1 Macs, or a keyboard sequence for booting into recovery mode on Intel Macs.

For exiting recovery mode, there’s no difference in either hardware or system software, it applies to all chip architectures and MacOS versions. Simply restart the Mac and let it boot up as normal. That’s about as easy as it gets.

Help, my Mac is automatically booting into recovery mode!

Rarely, a Mac will automatically boot into recovery mode. Even if you restart the Mac, it will boot back into recovery mode in this situation. There can be several reasons for this.

Automatically booting into recovery mode can happen because the Mac startup disk can’t be found, because the disk failed, or because there is no usable system software version present.

If the startup disk can’t be found, pull down the  Apple menu and choose “Startup Disk” and select the Macintosh HD boot volume or whatever your boot drive is named.

If the system software can’t be found, you’ll need to get the macOS system software again. You can reinstall MacOS on M1 Mac or reinstall macOS on Intel Mac.

If the drive has failed, the computer will need to be serviced, or have the disk replaced (assuming the disk is replaceable, which is not the case with most modern Macs that have soldered the SSD onto the logic board).

This can also happen because of nvram settings on Intel Macs, in which case resetting NVRAM typically resolves the problem right away.