Macbook Pro freezes on startup screen after installing 003 Rack Drivers

[juliano42]

So I have been going back and forth about buying the new Pro Tools 2018 so I can have Pro Tools on my new Mac w High Sierra 10.13.3 when I finally decided to pay the $300 to upgrade from Pro Tools 10 Avids website said I would have to pay $600 cause my upgrade to Pro Tools 10 was for some reason not registered on my Avid Master Account (not sure how this happened cause I am pretty sure you have to register it to use it right?)

So anyways I emailed Avid and Sweetwater a few weeks ago and Sweetwater contacted me back but Avid did not, now Sweetwater is even helping me get in touch with Avid. So I figured in the meantime I could use Pro Tools First to get me by till I figure out what I want to do. Then I would be able to use my 003 Rack interface as an interface with Logic like I used to do a while back.

So I downloaded Pro Tools First...no problems
Then I downloaded the Drivers for the 003 Rack, then when my(2012) Macbook Pro restarted after the install was complete it froze on the startup screen. After a few hours I tried restarting again...
Then resetting the PRAM...
Then booted up in Recovery Mode and used the First Aid on both the SSD hard drive and then on the osx base system...
But still no luck, it was freezing at the end of the loading process when it got to 100% of the progress bar filled, after first aid it freezes up after about 30% of the progress bar is filled...

After looking online it looks like the next thing I can try is to reinstall high sierra or back up my files and do a full on factory re start which I am really not wanting to do...

If I could just get into the hard drive I would erase Pro Tools First and the 003 Drivers and just wait till I talked to Avid about getting Pro Tools 2018.4 for the price I should be able to get it for $300, not $600.

Or if they won't do that then I am planning to start using just Logic Pro X which I have already been using to make beats lately I just haven't ever recorded with it and know I will probably have to get a new Interface, even tho I used to use the 003 Rack as an Interface for Logic and Reason but that was when I had Pro Tools 10 on my old CPU running Snow Leopard.

Pretty much my whole studio has been screwed since my kids broke my old Macbook Pro and since I got a new/used 2012 Macbook Pro I haven't been able to get Pro Tools working without upgrading to PTs 2018 since the guy I bought the new Macbook Pro from loaded high sierra on it before I bought it which doesn't seem to work with most everything lol.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, I have looked all overthe net and haven't found any info about the same problem which is really in short...
2012 Macbook Pro freezes on start up after installing Pro Tools First and Digi 003 Rack Drivers.

Thanks again this site has always been such a good resource for me and all my problems!!!

Yall are the best tech support!!!

[Rich Breen]

Somebody probably has more detailed insight into this issue than I do, but I'll just suggest trying the same thing with Sierra and formatting the system drive HFS+ instead of APFS. I had a similar issue (though nothing to do with 003) trying to move my rig (MacPro 5,1 dual hex with Samsung EVO850 SSD startup) from Yosemite to High Sierra; after a full clean install of HS and PT Ultimate HDX, things would work well for a few hours (or a day or so) and then the drive would hang on boot and become unmountable; Disk Utility would pass the drive as fine, but it would not mount. Since there are currently no good APFS directory diagnosis/repair utilities out there (Diskwarrior and others are not yet fully supporting APFS), and since High Sierra insists on an APFS format for SSD system drives, I had no way to repair the startup drive; tried 3 times with full installs and every time would run for a few hours or a day just fine and then hang on startup with the same result of an unbootable, unmountable startup drive.

Honestly, I didn't have time to dig into this any further, so I just gave up and went with Sierra and HFS+ and all works just fine. Until we have a decent directory repair utility for APFS I'm gonna stay away from it on all of my machines.

If you come up with any better info, please post.

best,
rich