MacOS – How to remove “Disabled Software” from MacOS System Report when a provided uninstall tool does not work

kernel-extensionsmacosmojave

Is there a way to manually remove an item from the Disabled Software list or mark it as enabled when the version and date disabled are both listed as unknown?

The example below describes a situation where this happened. I am looking for a general approach to removing "Disabled Software" from the macOS System Report when a provided uninstall tool does not work. While this example references DisplayLink Driver, my goal is to solve this problem when other drivers produce this problem too.

For those who work for or with DisplayLink and have suggested DisplayLink-specific approaches (i.e. manually delete specific files and use the uninstall tool), I appreciate your suggestions. However, the provided solutions did not work for this scenario. I have also tried manually installing the driver using kext commands without success.

Best Answer

I have managed to get it working again. Here are the steps I had to go to:

Uninstall the DisplayLink drivers and restart the system.
Right after restarting the system, reinstall the drivers. Don't restart again yet.
Open System Preferences -> Security and Privacy. If you did that right after reinstalling the drivers, you should see a message saying that an extension was blocked. You should know what to do now.

The message on step 3 only was displayed to me immediately after starting the system.

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MacOS – 3rd-party SSDs: enabling TRIM without disabling kext signing

See my answer here:

Since the release of 10.10.4, Apple now provides a new tool called trimforce, allowing users to activate TRIM also on unsupported disks. So now you can do:

sudo trimforce enable

SSD Optimization in Yosemite – How to Keep Your SSD in Shape on macOS

EDIT 3:

Yes! Since the release of 10.10.4, Apple now provides a new tool called trimforce, allowing users to activate TRIM also on unsupported disks. So now the ultimate and final answer is:

sudo trimforce enable

/EDIT 3

EDIT 1:

Finally I found a way! Apparently there is a neat trick hidden in the fsck tool as this answer says.

So in the future I will boot into Single User Mode (press ⌘+S at boot screen) from time to time and issue the command fsck -fy. It will check the disk and finish with the message Trimming unused blocks.

/EDIT 1

EDIT 2:

So there is a new tool called Disk Sensei that specializes on exactly that problem. It has a manual TRIM command and helps you turning Yosemite's kext signing on and off.

/EDIT 2:

Furthermore, I read about DiskFresh which would somewhat accomplish what I was originally asking for. This Windows (Bootcamp partition required) tool will rewrite all data of partitions or an entire disk. This approach seems a little less painful than wiping my SSD and restoring it from a backup. However, it also comes with the downside of doing an additional write cycle.

Best Answer

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