Google has confirmed that a recent Chrome update is the culprit reportedly affecting “trashcan” Mac Pro computers with the Avid video editing suite installed. The search giant says it has a solution to recover affected machines.
A Monday report by Variety said “Trashcan” Mac Pros running older versions of macOS and AVID’s Media Composer software are refusing to reboot after shutting down. Hollywood Film and TV editors discovered the issue late on Monday.
While it was initially believed that the issue may have been a virus or malware affecting Avid Media Composer version 8.8 or later on a 6.1 Mac Pro running a version of macOS prior to High Sierra, further investigations revealed the issue with the Chrome update.
A Google Support page explains the error, and offers a list of Terminal commands to resolve the issue. Google says the issue was a “Chrome update may have shipped with a bug that damages the file system on macOS machines with System Integrity Protection (SIP) disabled, including machines that do not support SIP.” Google has paused the release of the Chrome update while a new update can be finalized without the bug.
If you have not taken steps to disable System Integrity Protection and your computer is on OS X 10.9 or later, this issue cannot affect you.
Google lists the following process to recover your machine from the issue:
To recover a machine that has been affected by this bug, please boot into recovery mode, and then from the Utilities menu open the Terminal application.
In the Terminal application, you can run the following commands:
chroot /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD # "Macintosh HD" is the default
rm -rf /Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate/GoogleSoftwareUpdate.bundle
mv var var_back # var may not exist, but this is fine
ln -sh private/var var
chflags -h restricted /var
chflags -h hidden /var
xattr -sw com.apple.rootless "" /varThen reboot. This will remove the affected version of Google Software Update, then restore the damaged portion of the file system.