After encountering a kernel panic loop, I rebooted my mac to Recovery Mode but now it only starts in Recovery Mode so I chose Install macOS Sierra, connected to my wifi, but it says the disk is locked. 
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Disk is locked at Install macOS
- Thread starter skmcdesign
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Sometimes it’s a case that the disk is encrypted. If you right click the disk in Disk Utility, select Unlock, then enter your user password.
Does that work?
Does that work?
Sometimes it’s a case that the disk is encrypted. If you right click the disk in Disk Utility, select Unlock, then enter your user password.
Does that work?
Cant right click on anything.
Pretty much locked into Recovery mode
I also can't Erase any of the images or devices that are in the left hand column of Disk Utility
When you say you can't do any of that; Why can't you? Grayed out options? Error messages?
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While that's a common failure, it usually leads to different symptoms.
Right click brings up nothing anywhere I click.
First Aid runs but doesnt change anything.
It gives me a failure everytime I try to make a new partition. Erase, Restore, and Mount are grayed out. The OS X is gray and locked on the Install macOS High Sierra screen.
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It's a desktop mac with High Sierra . or it did have high sierra
From the recovery screen, if you go to Utilities in the menu bar, you can bring up Terminal.
Run diskutil list to get a list of all disks seen by the Terminal (a lot of these will be related to the installation of macOS, ignore these)
Find your drive on the list, and note down its device ID (/dev/diskX, where X is a number).
Then run
diskutil eraseDisk JHFS+ MacintoshHD /dev/diskX
replacing X with the number of your disk, and optionally replacing MacintoshHD with what you want the drive named (No spaces. If you want the name to include a space, you need to put the whole name in quotation marks "")
If you get an error message, post it back here
How do i know which one is my drive? Scared of making more mistakes..
I erased my Macintosh HD drive as a ditch effort awhile ago. When using terminal it lists GUID_partition_scheme, EFI EFI, OS X Base System (which is 499.2 GB), and Boot Recovery HD
new development -after booting with CMD + R
disk utility is now giving me the option to erase the Volume I created accidentally, called "os x base system".
The device can also be erased too.
Disk Images "Apple disk image" and "osx base system" appeared in the left column.
Edit
I am downloading High Sierra.
I ended up using the erase tool on the volume I had created to unlock the hard drive. The erase button only came to be available after doing *another* a command + r reboot. I input the settings the installer requested.
Erasing the device unmounted the volume and made the hard drive null on the install window.
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I can't tell you how it happened, but I can tell you what's wrong. Your entire hard drive had been turned into a macOS Installer.
After loads of faffing around with disk utility and terminal I finally found something that worked. I am installing a new ssd drive in a macpro. I kept getting disk locked message. This is because there are not enough partitions on the new disc. I partitioned the new drive into 3 sections. One for the install disc one for the new installation on the mac pro and the remainder was about 900mb. You could muck about and estimate what you need. I used install disc creator for the install disc, this worked well once I had figured out what was going on. Hope this helps.