Can't eject without admin password - 10.8.3

Apparently someone set up those two iMacs w/passwords. Check out KB Article: Changing or resetting an account password

Please post a screenshot of the password dialog.

Did you ever find a solution to this? I have the same problem with my laptop. Doesn't matter if its a CD/DVD or a USB drive, trying to eject always asks for an admin password.

It's worth noting that my account has admin priveleges, and it asks anyway.

Hello, support.westphal,

I think the bugs that you and I are experiencing are quite similar, if not exactly the same.

Like you, I help to manage several iMacs in an academic lab setting. The iMacs are running OS X 10.8.3 Mountain Lion.

When logged into the Admin account, I am able to eject external drives and media in the usual ways. However, when I am logged in as a standard user, I receive a dialogue whenever I try to eject anything (CD's, flash drives, you name it). The dialogue says:

"Finder wants to make changes. Type an administrator's name and password to allow this."

and prompts me for a name and password. If I authenticate, the eject succeeds. If I click "Cancel" instead, then this dialogue disappears, and two different dialogues appear.

One of the dialogues (let's call it dialogue A) says:

"The disk 'Disk Name' wasn't ejected because one or more programs may be using it.

To eject the disk immediately, click the Force Eject button."

In addition, dialogue A has a spinning wheel next to a line of text that reads "Trying to eject."

The other dialogue (let's call it dialogue B) says:

"UnmountAssistantAgent wants to make changes. Type an administrator's name and password to allow this."

If I cancel dialogue B, one of two things happens:

1. Dialogue B reappears a few seconds later

2. Dialogue B disappears and does not reappear. The spinning wheel on dialogue A disappears, and the message "Trying to eject" changes into a "Try Again" button

If I cancel dialogue A, it disappears. If I click "Force Eject" on dialogue A, another message pops up asking if I'm sure I want to eject. If I confirm the Force Eject, another copy of dialogue B appears!

If I cancel this new copy of dialogue B, a message finally appears that says my disk has been ejected! However, for all intents and purposes, the disk is most certainly NOT ejected. The disk's icon remains on my desktop, and I can still add/remove/edit files on the drive. Furthermore, if I try to eject the disk at this point, I go through the process I just described all over again.

"Get Info" tells me that I have read and write access to the drive. The Terminal's ' ls -la ' command confirms I have the right perms, and the ' ls -le ' command does not show any ACL info.

I have rebooted and shut down my machine several times since I noticed this happening (been troubleshooting for a few days now). I have repaired permissions using both Disk Utility and the recovery partition.

Lastly, I have installed and re-installed the 10.8.3 combo update. Still, the problem persists.

I'm looking for a solution, as well as advice. I would also really appreciate confirmation that this is a bug in 10.8. If any readers are experiencing this same issue, please say so! If this really is a bug, it is likely that Apple doesn't really know about it yet, since most Mac users have Admin accounts. I would also like to know if this issue is present in a vanilla install of Mountain Lion.

Many thanks!

support.westphal,

I wanted to know if this disk-eject issue was really a bug in the 10.8.3 vanilla install. We keep a vanilla image for most of the recent OS X releases on our DeployStudio server. After installing the fresh 10.8.3 image on one of our machines, I could not recreate the disk-eject issue.

This made it very clear that the disk-eject issue was a result of one of the many modifications that we made to the vanilla image. We use some really neat software called Radmind to manage these modifications. We have a Radmind server that remembers what the filesystems should look like for each of our machines, storing this information in text files called "transcripts".

When my colleague made the very first mountain lion "transcript" (also known as the "base transcript"), he must have missed some important tidbit that was in the 10.8.3 vanilla install. I didn't know what that tidbit is, but fortunately, I didn't need that info. I simply remade the "base transcript" from the 10.8.3 vanilla install, and then piled all of our other modifying "transcripts" on top of that (Radmind makes it very easy to do this).

So far, I haven't seen the issue reappear, but I'm still testing thoroughly to be sure.

support.westphal, it is unfortunate that this post may not be very helpful to you! There are a hundred ways to manage a mac lab, and our methods may be very different.

What you might be able to take away from this: if you've already tried every solution you could think of or find on the web, try starting from scratch. It sounds like you folks keep a "base image" on your image server, and then take care of all the "little details" (like keying software and printer setup) by hand. If the only commonality between the machines that are experiencing the disk-eject issue is that they all share the same "base image", It may be that your "base image" itself has the flaw.

I hope this post inspires a solution in you. I have faith that you'll figure it out. When things have returned to "normal" (whatever that is) for your mac labs, I request that you check out some software that we use to manage our labs. It may make your life easier : )

I've already told you about Radmind. It's kind of like Munki, but it offers much more control over your filesystems. It's open source and developed by the research systems unix group at U. Mich. Heres the link:

rsug.itd.umich.edu/software/radmind/

The other software I'd like to recommend is KeyServer. There's a chance you already use it, but it makes the software keying process less of a pain. You can probably just google this one.

Good luck!

Thank you so much (or thanks to whomever you got this from). I've been struggling with this on my machine, and this fixed it. I didn't even have to copy a file from a different machine, I just added the following to the file:

<key>system.volume</key>

<dict>

<key>removeable</key>

<string>on-console</string>

</dict>

Didn't even need to reboot.

Hi All,

I am still having this issue of requiring admin passwords for ejecting any kind of disk whether it be USB or CD. Does this authorization file entry need to be in a specific place in the file? I tried what was suggested and still having the issue. Any other thoughts? Thanks.

I seem to have the same problem. I have an old HD from MacBook Pro on a HD dock that was erased and now shows up normally on Finder sidebar except the Eject icon is missing. If I right click on the HD name and choose Eject "320GB" it will bring up the "UnmountAssistantAgent...." box and "The disk "320GB" wasn't ejected because one or more programs may be using it?" box. Force Eject will not work.

I could type in Admin, but the bigger problem is that the HD will not show up in Finder at all when I put the HD in an external HD enclosure.

I found the /private/etc directory and didn't see anything interesting there...