Location of Update Files that Did Not Update.

[elephant88]

Hello,

I have a 2015 Macbook Pro running El Capitan 10.11.6. The laptop is connected to an old Thunderbolt monitor that works perfectly but will not tolerate software updates for whatever reason. The way around that was to . . . not update the software for the monitor. However, I accidentally did so one day and now I am faced with an error message every time I boot up the laptop that tells me that the Thunderbolt display update failed to install and do I want to retry or cancel?

I need to get rid of that error message and believe the path forward is to delete the update file. However, all of the posts I have found regarding the location of update files point to locations that don't exist in El Capitan. I've found a Firmware Update folder in System > Library > Core Services > TBFirmwareUpdate that certainly seemed relevant, but OSX does not permit me to delete the .bin files contained in the folder. I would appreciate help in finding that update file and any special instructions that might be necessary to delete it so that the damn error message that I see every time I boot up goes away. Thanks so much.

 

[MacUser2525]

Boot your recovery partition open Terminal and use I think it called the csrutil program to disable the SIP that stops you from using your own computer as you see fit to do, you can reverse the process to re-enable it later if you wish to.

 

[elephant88]

Boot your recovery partition open Terminal and use I think it called the csrutil program to disable the SIP that stops you from using your own computer as you see fit to do, you can reverse the process to re-enable it later if you wish to.

Whoa. You really know what you are talking about. I know how to boot into my recovery partition, but am not familiar with csrutil or SIP. You are saying to do those things to enable me to delete the files that I could not delete?

 

[MacUser2525]

Whoa. You really know what you are talking about. I know how to boot into my recovery partition, but am not familiar with csrutil or SIP. You are saying to do those things to enable me to delete the files that I could not delete?

Yes that is the idea Apple in its wisdom has decided security theatre in the form of System Integrity Protection would be enabled to prevent users from deleting system files. Now if they wanted real security this would not be allowed to take place and they would have enabled the feature in efi the secure boot where nothing but signed binaries and system files are allowed. In short now I am done my rant on that, disable it then you can delete the file re-enable it if you wish to after.

 

[elephant88]

Yes that is the idea Apple in its wisdom has decided security theatre in the form of System Integrity Protection would be enabled to prevent users from deleting system files. Now if they wanted real security this would not be allowed to take place and they would have enabled the feature in efi the secure boot where nothing but signed binaries and system files are allowed. In short now I am done my rant on that, disable it then you can delete the file re-enable it if you wish to after.

Could you please give me the command line entry in terminal that will disable SIP? I'm afraid I don't know. I can boot into the recovery partition and start terminal. So, then what do I type to fire up csrutil and disable SIP? After entering the command, I should just restart the laptop and try deleting those files again? Thanks again for your advice to an OSX noob.

 

[MacUser2525]

csrutil disable and yes once done you can delete no need for restart since you will be root in that Terminal already a /sbin/mount -uw / to mount the root file system read/write then a rm /path/to/file/to/delete and reboot should be it. Of course you can change the csrutil command to enable for the last command before rebooting and have it enabled again.

Edit: csrutil status will tell you the current setting(s) of it. And a quick Google tells me you may need a reboot before being able to delete the file in the recovery terminal. So you can do that delete the file in the recovery mode re-enable again then the next boot everything should be back to normal.

http://osxdaily.com/2015/10/05/disable-rootless-system-integrity-protection-mac-os-x/