Unapproved Caller

Hello everyone,

I'm sure that a lot of folks are still seeing this issue.

For some, none of the above methods work. I know, because we've tried all of them here with a system that refused to boot after seeing this error while attempting to update Adobe Creative Cloud applications.

Try this, if you are at the end of your list of recommendations:

If you have a known-good system, do one of the following:

1. Boot from an external, known-good Mac hard drive

• Pull the drive, slap it into a dock, and connect to the sick Mac
• Option-boot the sick Mac, and select the external drive to boot from, accepting any Security requests when prompted, entering appropriate creds
• Compare your working Mac's permissions on the var/folders items with the items on the sick Mac, and match the sick Mac's permissions to the good Mac's

2.Connect good Mac to sick Mac via FireWire and boot into Target Mode

Fix permissions as described above

Reboot and test.

For us, this method worked like a champ. Rebooted, and user can now update software to her heart's content.

Cheers!

Tony C.

Ilya L.

My case (MacBook Pro 15'' Mid2009) the process has been the following:

1) Disk repair/Repair permission

From recovery partition

2) Reinstall :

• Mavericks
• Yosemite

This worked during 2 weeks

3) Resetting PRAM/NVRAM, SMC --> Nothing

4) Single user mode experience:

• /sbin/fsck –fy
• /sbin/mount -uw /
• rm -Rf /var/folders/*

I got a lot of problems in the structure of the disk that usually with this process were solved.

At the beginning it seems to be totally solved but after some weeks or 1 month, the problem appears again, and during the last weeks the solution worked some hours til I had to reboot (in some cases it didn't start) and I had to repeat the process, so finally, after reading some opinions I decided to change the hard drive cable and try...

And YES!! 4 days without any problem, it seems a new computer 🙂.

After months and months of problems, in 10 minutes, solved. It seems that my cable was in bad conditions and each day in worse conditions. I hope that I will forget this nightmare.

Hi everyone! I received the "Unapproved Caller, securityagent may only be invoked by Apple Software" the 24th December (I was kinda' not happy), I searched on the Web and found this conversation. I went to the nearest Apple Store the 27th, explained my problem and talked to them right away about the HDD cable. The employee did a lot of check-ups, all saying that all the elements of my computer (drivers, battery, etc) were totally fine. He did a last thing, to restart my computer from nothing (I had a backup with Time Machine) and realized he wasn't able to erase the content of my computer. He admit it had to be the cable that caused my problem. I left my computer at the store and they called me the next day to say that it was ready to take home. I had the Apple Care so it didn't cost my anything but even if I had to pay, it would have cost 60$.

So, if you have this problem, don't hesitate and bring your computer to an Apple Store, it doesn't cost much and it's fast if you know what is the problem. It took me 4 days (and it would probably have been faster if it wasn't during Christmas Day) and my computer is back to normal.

Hope it helped 🙂

Hi Rick,

I originally had this problem with my mid-2010 MacBook Pro in April 2014 (I posted about it back then), after having swapped out the hard drive in January 2014. After replacing my hard drive cable the problem disappeared and never returned. In summer of 2015 my replacement hard drive failed, so I replaced it. And surprise, by November 2015 I had the "unapproved caller" message again. Once I had replaced the HDD cable again it was gone again, and my laptop (now more than six years old) works fine to the present day. So I have to assume that the "unapproved caller" message was either related to damage that the cable incurred while I was swapping the drive or that it is cumulative damage, perhaps due to excessive heat (the 1 TB hard drive that I used as a replacement for the original one kept on spinning almost non-stop, and the bottom of my laptop often got quite hot).

From my experience you only need to replace the HDD cable, not the SATA cable. Hope that this helps.

I must concur with those who identified the HDD cable as the source of the problem. My Macbook Pro (mid-2010) started showing the "unapproved caller" message about two weeks ago, associated with the same symptoms that others described. Tried everything from reparing disk permissions, Maverick reinstall to removing var/folders/--all to no avail. I was skeptical at first about blaming the HDD cable but once I had swapped it out for a new one the problem was gone--all back to normal! I had replaced my Hard Drive earlier this year, so it is possible that the cable got damaged in the process.

Since people come up with very different solutions to the "unapproved caller" phenomenon, either the "unapproved caller" message flags multiple, very different problems (seems unlikely but who knows ....), or some of the suggested remedies won't hold up. Keep reporting in if your solution worked or failed to keep its promise! A word from Apple on this issue would be nice too....

I used this method

Jul 31, 2014, 09:26 AM

#5

E3BK macrumors 65816 Join Date: Mar 2008 Location: NYC

Quote: Originally Posted by mimimelo After doing lots of reading everywhere and trial and error, and getting very frustrated about this stupid "Ununapproved caller" apple message this is what worked for me: (Please pay close attention to the way the text is written and when there is a space. If you don't enter it exactly, it won't work) - Start on single user mode: Hit the Command and S keys at start-up Wait until the writing stops completely -At the line, type (after root): /sbin/fsck -fy (space after the k) Hit the ENTER key wait until it finishes and says "... appears to be OK" next, type: /sbin/mount -uw / (space after the t and after the w) Hit the ENTER key then type: rm -Rf /var/folders/* (space after the m and the f) Hit the ENTER key Run FSCK again (I did, just in case, but you may not have to): /sbin/fsck -fy Finally, type REBOOT, hit ENTER and wait until computer starts. Hope it works for you all as well as it did for me! THANK YOU!!!! I am crossing my fingers that this did the trick. I still don't understand how it happened. I tried another suggestion to just delete that var/folders folder but it kept coming back. So far, your method has stuck. UPDATE: The problem came back. But I think I figured out what the problem was. I started getting these errors when I upgraded my other MBP to Yosemite. I think because the iCloud drive updated, it's causing some kind of conflict/error on the one I left on Mavericks. I decided to see if the problem went away if I upgraded the problem Mac to Yosemite as well. Looks like the issue went away for real this time. Cross fingers that it stays away.

So I followed this process and have not had it return. Probably goof=d for two weeks now with no return of the glitch. Hope it helps.

Wow !,, this worked for me also.

I could not get my mac into single user mode, so i used the terminal from the install USB, i ran:

fsck

then i removed the folder in question with:

rm -R /var/folders/*

then after a reboot, all was fine, thanks !

I Have not taken my Mac to the Apple Store , but from my own expertese and diagnostics I have found that only the SATA cable can be the issue. I replaced my hard drive with SSD's and other hard drives and they didn't work in my MacBook pro despite them being fine in all of my other macs and pc's. A while ago I replaced my dvd drive in my Mac with a hard drive bay and this also worked fine with all drives. The only thing that fixes the issue is new SATA connector.

Please let me know if you need any other help

Derran

I had this issue across about fifty different Macs. I highly doubt it was a bad cable on fifty machines, turns out an errant update from Adobe Flash, which was deployed the night before, corrupted some files in /var/folders. A simple reboot fixed the issue and people were able to log in to Mac OS.

Error: Unapproved caller. SecurityAgent may only be invoked by Apple software.

I had this issue while trying to install Yosemite on MBP 2014 model SSD.

Solution was to run Disk Utility and Repair Disk Permissions. Then I rebooted and logged into an Administrator account. I was able to run the Yosemite installer without the error. If you only have one account I would try creating a new account with Admin rights. Then log onto that account and run the install from there.

pcteklink.com

I would try to boot up in Disk Utility. I would then try to repair disk permission. If you hold down Option key then turn on the Mac this should take you into Disk Utility. I don't believe it's the cable to the HDD.

Chitoo - please let us know if/how it all works out for you and list your troubleshooting for future reference. These threads are valuable for those of us who are amateurs and complete idiots.

Good Luck!

😎

Unapproved Caller

BilalamaApr 10, 2014 12:03 PM Re: Unapproved Caller
Re: Unapproved Callerin response to tmodi

I must concur with those who identified the HDD cable as the source of the problem. My Macbook Pro (mid-2010) started showing the "unapproved caller" message about two weeks ago, associated with the same symptoms that others described. Tried everything from reparing disk permissions, Maverick reinstall to removing var/folders/--all to no avail. I was skeptical at first about blaming the HDD cable but once I had swapped it out for a new one the problem was gone--all back to normal! I had replaced my Hard Drive earlier this year, so it is possible that the cable got damaged in the process.

Since people come up with very different solutions to the "unapproved caller" phenomenon, either the "unapproved caller" message flags multiple, very different problems (seems unlikely but who knows ....), or some of the suggested remedies won't hold up. Keep reporting in if your solution worked or failed to keep its promise!

A word from Apple on this issue would be nice too....

I just noticed that this threat, which started more than a year ago, is still going on. My MacBook Pro (mid 2010) started showing the "unapproved caller" message in March 2014. After trying out every other proposed remedy posted in this threat I replaced the HDD cable. This solved the problem. My MacBook, in fact, is still running in spite of its advanced age, even having been upgraded to OS X Yosemite. If other fixes work as well then great, but from what I see no one who replaced the HDD cable has experienced this problem again.

To update: I got the cable previous Thursday and installed it in the evenings.

I installed the Hard Disk which gave me the problem in the first place back in and it booted up just fine!

I still run it and have had no problems what so ever!

I suggest to every one having this "Unapproved Caller" error just to install a new HDD Cable. It isn't cheap but it saves you a lot of time. And there fore money. By any means, try the other solutions as it definitely worked for a few of us. However, changing the HDD cable worked for almost all of us and is an permanent solution.

I just installed the Maveriks update - 10.9.1 - and had the same "unapproved caller" erorr message pop up on a loop..gray screen, no other options than to click "okay" and let it repeat. Called Apple, they had me power off and reboot in safe mode, which thankfully allowed me to boot up and log in. Reset the RAM, etc., and for now, things are working fine...