Quote Originally Posted by newuser View Post
Thank you. I thought perhaps the disk wipe (as I only have one disk, the SSD) would also wipe the embedded recovery software.
Wiping the SSD actually WILL wipe the hidden recovery partition. But if you do a recovery boot as they suggested, and there's no local recovery partition, your Mac will download one across the internet. The OS install will create a new hidden recovery partition.

Pro tip: I just noticed a bug in High Sierra's Disk Utility that may also affect Sierra. If a drive is completely and totally blank, as it should be after getting wiped, Disk Utility won't show it, so you won't be able to select it. If you're caught by this, you can boot from an older OS, go into Disk Utility there, select the drive, and erase it. This will format and partition the drive enough for High Sierra's Disk Utility to find it without wasting your time installing an old OS; after that just boot from the flash drive and install whatever you want. When you do an internet recovery, you boot from the OS the system shipped with, so unless your system is new enough to have shipped with High Sierra this will let you work around that problem.