macOS Catalina – when “Allow” does not appear in System Preferences

The saying goes “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it!” – Oh Yeah. But sometimes it is inevitable…

Problem

Last month, under macOS Mojave (10.14) suddenly VMWare did not want to start, because of a security issue internal to macOS. In the end it was decided to upgrade to 10.15 macOS Catalina (even though macOS 11, BigSur is out but brand new.) VMWare was back on track rather quickly… but then BOX.app refused to start…. Ah!

It took 1 month to find a solution… scouring the forums… Box help was not helpful due to an internal snafu that made me invisible to them for a while (and for which today the Applications Specialist apologized for the “radio silence.”)

Solution

In the end I believe that the solution was that provided at this forum: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/398514/no-allow-button-in-security-and-privacy-preferences and these are the steps I took yesterday (12/29/2020)

– downloaded and re-installed Box Drive
– Following details in the link I recovered the vendor code which is M683GB7CPW
– restarted in recovery mode (Command R)
– launched Terminal in recovery mode and gave command: spctl kext-consent add M683GB7CPWI did not have to use sudo as in recovery mode we are root
– restarted in normal mode: No change

But today, I still tried to start Box.app and Wow, it launched! so it is now functional again.

I think that the information from the forum can be useful for other installations that might have a problem with security in that way. The “trick”to check the vendor Apple code by clicking on the installer, top right, icon…

So it is written, so shall it be.

EDIT: THE COMPLETE SOLUTION

Today (Jan 4, 2021) after an automated reboot of the Mac the problem reappeared. After lots of tests again and failure of the above method (apparently) all I had to do was to add this command that I did not think important last time as it is called a “test” (verifying that the kernel extension can be loaded.) BUT everything worked when I added this last command:

sudo kextutil -t -v 6 /Library/StagedExtensions/Library/Filesystems/box.fs/Contents/Extensions/10.11/osxfuse.kext/

The “verbose” level (-v 6) might not be important but it shows that “something is happening.”

So there you go!

Happy New Year 2021 !

The complete step by step solution would be:

EDIT: removed the sudo from the command giving in Terminal during recovery mode as user is alreadty root and sudo gives error.