Error installing Nvidia driver for Mac Pro

[nlistgarten]

I am fairly competent with computers, but I've run into a problem that has me completely stumped. I have an Nvidia Quadro K1200 graphics card in my Mac Pro tower. I have used the Nvidia drivers with no problems, up until a few weeks ago, when Apple released the security update for OS X 10.11. When I tried installing the new driver, it gave me an error. I have now gotten this error in both OS X 10.11 and macOS 10.12, with both driver versions 346.03.15f03 and 367.15.10.05f01. The error appears after running through the whole install dialogue:

Now, I looked at the logs in the Console and it appears to be some kind of SandboxViolation or System Policy error. Here is the list of errors that occurred during the installation:

I can add the full text of the errors if that would be helpful, but I'm wondering if anyone has any ideas of what the problem is and how to fix it.

 

[tomvos]

This looks like it's related to System Integrity Protection (SIP).

However, the driver installer should ask you for your admin password and thus allow changes to the /System/... section of your filesystem. Did you get a dialog asking for your system password when running the installer?

Furthermore, is your Mac managed from your IT department or is a stand-alone machine, i.e. do the standard policies apply or has anybody from the IT department messed with the policies?

Besides this, you might want to try to install from a different user account. Perhaps something block the required privilege escalation in your account.

If everything fails, you could even disable SIP … but please enable it afterwards.

 

[nlistgarten]

I will answer my own question. Thanks to the help of some fabulous commenters from multiple sites I managed to disable System Integrity Protection (SIP) and install the driver. However, because I couldn't see the screen I had a bit of trouble. I booted the Mac Pro into target disk mode, then took an Apple laptop and used a FireWire -> thunderbolt cable to connect the two. I booted the laptop holding down the alt key. I selected the Mac Pro's recovery partition and booted into that. I disabled SIP in there. However because SIP is hardware specific, I had to change the laptop's startup disk to the one from the Mac Pro. I let it reboot, then installed the driver and shut off both computers. I booted both the laptop and Mac Pro up. The Mac Pro had installed the driver and still had SIP enabled. The laptop rebooted from its internal SSD. I hope this helps someone else!