System Extension Blocked - but can't allow extension

Thank you for your thorough update. I wLund up starting from scratch and doing a clean install and it solved my problems. I had to do a lot manually after that since I did not have a proper back up to restore from (I had a clone of my drive but since it was on beta 10.13.1 and my main machine which was on 10.13, they couldn’t properly talk to each other in order to do a restore). I think I like having a clean system anyway, and I was able to eliminate all the crud that built up over the years. I lost Photoshop CS5 in the process, but I don’t think I’ll miss it too much. I still have to work on getting my photos organized and back up on my main machine, but overall I’m very happy where I am now. In all my years and all my updates, this is the first time I ever needed to do a clean install and now I know firsthand the advantages. Best of luck to everyone!

Okay, last update from my journey. Like I expected, installing High Sierra over the second buggy one did nothing, it was just a waste of an hour. So I went nuclear again. Erased the disc, did a clean install and took my time putting my apps and data back this time. No sense spending a day just copying stuff if I have to redo it all again the day after. So I took my time, grabbed the most used things from the App Store, put vital data back and started working on the machine like normal. Put stuff back when I needed it or when I had some spare time. At this point everything is back where it belongs, all my apps are here, et and everything works fine. No issues whatsoever (just the media keys on the keyboard that are not fixed to iTunes anymore but switch over to whatever app they want :/ ).

So I'm not sure what happened with my first clean install, but the second fixed everything. That second install was done with the same bootable USB drive, not an updated one, so your guess is as good as mine as to why things went haywire again.

But at least I'm back to business as usual 🙂 It took me over a week, and I have a clean system now (which to be fair might not be such a bad thing after a decade of updates).

So for anyone else with this problem, unfortunately it seems like a clean install is your only option 😟

Hi, there is a fast solution for this "allow button problem" and is that you can disable the allow kernel extension mess.

You should boot your OsX in Recovery Mode (Restart, and press Command R)

When you are in Recovery Mode, go to the menu bar and open a Terminal and run the next command:

$spctl kext-consent disable

Then reboot the OsX normally. All the mess are gone and all the kext are loaded as usual.

Reseting the NVRAM will revert this changes!

😀

My migration failed due to an old driver (Silicon Image 3132 PCIe eSATA card), resulting in a disturbing reboot loop until I turned off my external disk.

That installation interruption, I think, resulted in a corrupted Kernel Extension db. At least, sqlite3 didn't like the file very much. When you list the tables in that file, what's SUPPOSED to happen is this:

$ echo .tables | sqlite3 /private/var/db/SystemPolicyConfiguration/KextPolicy

kext_load_history_v3 kext_policy

I got the error: "database disk image is malformed"

I was able to fix this by booting into Recovery mode (cmd-R when the system comes up), moving the KextPolicy db out of the way in the Terminal app, and re-installing High Sierra.

Details: Once the system was up in recovery mode, I fired up the Terminal app (under "Utilities") and did this:

# cd /Volumes/System\ Drive/private/var/db/SystemPolicyConfiguration

# mv KextPolicy /Users/Shared

# mv migration.plist /Users/Shared

(Note: your system drive might be named something other than "System Drive". Also, I just wanted to make a backup of the files someplace where the installation process won't clobber them.)

I then quit the Terminal app and just re-installed High Sierra. 55 minutes later (or there abouts) I was able to list the tables in the KextPolicy db AND, best of all, VMWare fusion worked and no other Kext complaints were in evidence.

You can search the Internet for things like "SystemPolicyConfiguration" or "sqlite3 'database disk image is malformed'" to get a bunch of background info about this.

But, that said, I'll probably spend some part of my Christmas long weekend reinstalling this guy from scratch.

We had a similar issue here.

Our mac was controlled via "Screen Sharing". The popup that the "Allow" or "Allow..." button is meant to start doesn't appear when the button is pressed over Screen Sharing. Plugging in a hardware mouse and monitor allowed us to open the pop up sheet and allow the extensions. I have reported this bug RADR 35666776.

I managed to fix this issue. You'll have to disable SIP to let the Kext load without any interference.

Steps to disable SIP:

1. Boot into recovery mode (Hold CMD + R during booting process).

2. Open terminal and enter the following command: csrutil disable

3. Reboot the system. This should allow the kernel extensions to load without any interference.

(Re-enable SIP using csrutil enable)

This is clearly not the safest way to fix this, but it worked for me. I wasted many weeks because of this issue. It's truly sad that macOS has become less developer-friendly over the years.

Hello,

I have the same problem with vmware and paragon at job today. After lot of search eventually could fix with a NVRAM reset.Not at job before 10hours so if somebody could try and give feedback, that could be cool.

Ty

I have been having an issue installing an Antivirus package. The Allow button was showing but clicking on it wouldnt work. To fix the problem I created a new administrators user account and have now been able to "allow" the application in Security & Privacy from within that account. I am no expert but am wondering if the existing profile now has some conflict since upgrading to High Sierra.

Well, you can also consent to the specific extension(s) from recovery mode, but you need to know the team ID. The solution comes courtesy of Parallels (http://kb.parallels.com/124289) but should work for anyone, who is willing to give you the team ID.

Wow... thanks for the tip to about the screen sharing. Once I logged in directly I could click "allow". It seems Apple was smart enough to not accept screen sharing clicks on "Allow" ( which maybe is good for protection against remote attacks ) but not smart enough to gray the button or reroute it to a pop up that explains you can't do this.

I was wondering why I couldn't press "Allow" on my new iMac Pro and thought it had to do with special security on that machine, but it was just this issue. The error message in the console app whenever I tried to press allow via screen sharing was, "dcom.apple.preference.security.remoteservice Dropping mouse down event because sender's PID isn't 0 or self". In person there was no problem. A popup notification would have been helpful!

I had the same issue but was able to resolve it after logging in as the primary admin user (You may not have one, try to create a second admin user if you don't). As my user, the popup dialog that is created after clicking allow was not coming up. My guess is that the system thinks I don't have rights to all the extensions that I was trying to install. Hope it works for everyone.

You can reboot into recovery and do

spctl kext-consent add <Bitdefender TeamID>

the catch being that you have to know Bitdefender TeamID. Their support might be willing to tell you, though.

After that, reboot normally and install -- it should not block the extension any more.

Credit for this solution goes to Parallels support team (http://kb.parallels.com/en/124289) -- I am just quoting it here.

@johnpalmedina

I know the original issue was posted last year but this just happened to me. I am on OSX 10.13.3 and recently updated my AVG antivirus that required a kernel extension. I clicked and clicked on the privacy and security ALLOW the AVG to load a kernel extension but nothing happened. Until I found this article and noticed that I too was using MAGICPREFS. I quit MAGICPREFS and then clicked ALLOW in the privacy and security prefs. Worked like a charm. Thanks

Oh Apple get your stuff working some day, please! Every single last update made our life worse. Cannot even click on okay when connecting from a so called Apple server.

How on earth shall an external IT company deliver support on this crap?