AVID HDX card on clean Mac systems including M4 may require starting Macs in recovery mode.
- Pat Wright
- Jul 4
- 1 min read
We were helping one of our clients with their brand new Mac M4 and AVID HDX. We noticed right away that, although Pro Tools Ultimate launches with no problems, the HDX card was not being recognized in, Set Up/Playback Engine. After further trouble shooting and reinstalling the 2025.6 HD Driver firmware, the system was still not seeing the HDX card. We had confirmed in, About This Mac/System/More Info, that the Thunderbolt Bus was seeing the Sonnet HDX chassis but not the HDX card. We then tested the clients new HDX card our own Mac M2 Ultra with no problems. Realizing that with new Macs, some hardware devices require the computer to be started in recovery mode, most likely allowing, "user management of kernel extensions" needed to be addressed.
After starting in recovery mode and changing the, kernel extensions settings, the clean Mac M4 was able to see the HDX card (in the chassis) and HDX was now visible to be selected in the Pro Tools playback engine window.
During our trouble shooting we weren't able to see any specific new documentation online regarding starting Mac M4s in recovery mode, however we were able to find an article speaking to this issue with Mac M1.
Please see the section, "Installing the Avid HD Driver on a clean macOS system" in the following AVID link. The steps are the same for Mac M4:
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