I've recently installed El Capitan. The other day I restarted my computer for the first time for a while, and now it doesn't boot. I restarted in verbose mode and can see that there's a kernel panic relating to com.eltima.SyncMate.kext. It seemed like that was probably an incompatible extension, so I took a copy of the kext and then deleted EltimaAsync.kext from /System/Library/Extensions.
Sadly, when I rebooted, the problem persisted with the same kernel panic. I've searched high and low for other references to "eltima" anywhere on the drive, but I haven't found anything that looks relevant. I'm wondering if perhaps the kext has been pre-compiled in somewhere. I don't know if it's relevant, but the drive in question is encrypted with FileVault.
Is there something I can do to properly disable this kext so I can get the computer to boot? If possible I'd really like to avoid having to start from a clean install, even though I do have a good backup.
Best Answer
So, for anyone who is in a similar position to me, the critical step that I was missing after getting rid of the offending .kext, was removing the various caches that were resulting in it still getting loaded during the FileVault startup process.
Removing
/var/vm/sleep*and/var/folders/*from the FileVault volume caused all the caches to be rebuilt and the system booted correctly.