2019.12 HD Driver install bricked my MBP

[Southsidemusic]

Try rebooting with the N key held down and see if the popup window comes up where you can choose playback engine and report back. Of course you know to choose the HD Native Interface you have when popup appears.

[jbreher]

Well, Apple Tech Support had me reinstall the OS. That at least got me to a bootable system.

I have other things I need to do on this machine today. I'll poke at PT this evening.

What is the 'N at boot' thing you speak of? Is it documented somewhere? The 'at boot' makes me think it has to be an Apple thing, but your statement about 'playback engine' makes me think it is an Avid thing.

One thought that occurred to me while I was waiting for the OS reinstall to complete: When I installed the drivers, it was from a network drive. Perhaps the install process was unable to reach this drive upon reboot, thereby locking up the installation process? I'll copy locally before trying again.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by jbreher

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What is the 'N at boot' thing you speak of? Is it documented somewhere? The 'at boot' makes me think it has to be an Apple thing, but your statement about 'playback engine' makes me think it is an Avid thing.

Holding down the N key when starting Pro Tools lets you select the Playback Engine. It's been in Pro Tools for a very long time, and well documented in the Reference Guide.

It has nothing to do with booting the computer.

[Darryl Ramm]

Booting in disk target mode and trying doing some brain surgery to remove DigiDal.kext is one way to try to recover, doing a recovery partition based reinstall is another, but the first approach should be to have bootable clone backups on multiple separate external/removable drives. Usually be made with Carbon Copy Cloner. Then you just connect up the drive, reboot with the Option key held down... and choose to boot off that clone. getting back with everything running again should take ~1 minute. If you are not doing these clone based backups, I would get that started soon.