Unapproved Caller

Sorry to bother you. But before you changed the "old and broken" SATA cable, did apple genius bar say your "old and broken" cable is working fine? Because apparently they said my SATA cable is ok and I'm wondering if I should listen to them.

**** yeah.

deleting Var/Folders using Terminal when booting from the recovery partition appears to have fixed things for me

Posting symptoms in case it helps others:

I'm also a DJ - have 120gb SSD + 750gb HDD (in optical drive bay) on an early 2011 13" macbook pro.
I've got it running as a fusion drive setup.

preparing music for set at an outdoor festival tomorrow. I usually have too many apps and tabs open at once.
Chrome stopped responding

Couldn't close it
Couldn't bring up the force quit dialog
Couldn't bring up activity monitor
Spotlight stopped responding
Couldn't shut down the computer.

Forced a shut down by holding down the power button.
on restart, it prompted me to open the applications I had open previously - I accidentally hit "Yes".
System ground to a halt, similar symptoms again

Forced shut down again, this time said "No"
Chrome wouldn't open at all - clicking the icon in the dock caused it to bounce once and then do nothing
I tried other browsers, Firefox said my "Firefox profile could not be opened"
I tried taking a screenshot of the error, but I didn't "have permission to save files in the location where screenshots are stored"

so took photos of the messages on the screen using my phone.

somewhere in there I got the Unapproved Caller message.
First thought was "Have I contracted a Virus? is it systematically locking me out of my own system?"

from memory, computer slowly ground to a halt again. Lost the ability to boot normally.

Booted to safemode - ran sluggish, tried to repair permissions and disk etc, said it required being booted to the recovery partition.
that all worked but I fell asleep - woke up and it had frozen with an apple on the screen and a 50% progress bar.

started freaking out that one of the harddrives might have died. Was worried that recovering data would be problematic because of the nature of the fusion setup. Primarily worried about short term. I'm able to use housemates computer for the gig, but I don't have all of the music on here yet.

Found this thread, didn't want to replace harddrive cable.
Housemate helped me get some important music stuff backing up on to an external firewire drive - and backing up some ableton projects on to our server.

Figured out how to delete var/folders after reading this thread and some of the things linked by it (and other random google searches)
Navigated to the folder in Terminal
used ls to see that the only folder inside it was called "zz"

then typed:

rm -rf zz

to delete it.

Computer has booted fine.

and so far seems fully functional. Chrome opens etc.

Thank you to the people in this thread 🙂

I deliberately brought the SATA cable up but the basically said: "The problem is not with the Mac, that's why we can't take it in. The SSD is at fault here, you MUST claim your warranty."

But again, after fixing the cable, Recovering via Internet to Lion and upgraded to Mavericks; not a single issue has been happened since *knocks on wood*.

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

Thanks for your quick reply derrankyle. I'll keep you posted about my issue.

Thanks for your quick reply buddy. I'll keep you posted about my issue.

I spoke too soon.

Mine's not working again 😟

I'll try another cable when I get back from this festival.

Fortunately I can *read* stuff via target disk mode.

Writing seems to stop working intermittently - but since the OS is being handled by another computer, the whole thing doesn't grind to a halt when things are wigging out.

Trust me, it's the SATA cable. 100% sure.

hi its been 3 days since i changed the cable and its working fine now. thanks a lot.

I have a mid-2012 MacBook Pro 13". Started getting the SecurityAgent Unapproved Caller error two weeks ago. Repeated reboots did not fix it. Could not boot in safe mode. Followed the instructions to clean out /var/folders/* but this didn't cure the problem - did it again with same result. Although very skeptical, I finally bought a new SATA cable and installed it today. Computer successfully booted. Hard to believe that this is the fix, but it really does work.

Follow up post:

recap.. 2011 13" macbook pro with a fusion drive setup (SSD in harddrive location and a HDD in the optical drive bay)

None of the software fixes suggested in this thread worked as permanent fixes for me.

I found that the computer would grind to a halt when I was accessing files via target disk mode with my housemates computer.

I also found that I could boot when my SSD was in an external enclosure (even though it's one half of the fusion setup - osx seems smart enough to figure it all out)

so this all seemed consistent with it being a faulty internal SATA cable as many people suggested

got a new sata cable at the Apple store - it's their policy that they have to install it and keep the old one
ended up being about $70 AUD after parts and labour - kind of pricey, but I'm just happy to have it fixed.

it's been about 2 weeks and things have been great 🙂

I have read this entire thread and will post my issues in hopes to get more information. I am going to try the HD Cable and will report my results.

Last week, the beach ball started making an appearance a few time and it started getting slower and slower.

I did PRAM, SMC, NVRAM, ETC.... Ran Disk Utility, EtreCheck and then Reinstalled....and it got slower each time, even took me 8 hours in do the reInstall.

I figured the worst case and it must be the Hard Drive. Drove to OfficeMax and got a 1TB drive, and then, it wouldn't let the Disk Utility reformat to Mac OS.

Back to the store, spent 2 hours with the guy who had Max experience and we couldn't get anything to work, ever tried reformat in a PC and NOTHING.

Exchanged drive, and it worked....whew, finally. But Wait, there's more.

Got home, started installing my stuff while surfing the web and chatching up on email and BAM, i couldn't get on any Apple website or iCloud, it was like the internet was down, but other site worked fine - and Mail kept crashing.

REBOOT... everything seemed OK for an hour or two, then iPhoto started giving me an error message and then wouldnt reopen.

REBOOT...this time i get a Warning pop up that said: Unapproved Caller SecurityAgent may be invoked by Apple Software.

WHAT???

As of now, the computer will run for an hour or two and then it starts acting up...

WHAT IN THE MAC UNIVERSE CAN BE WRONG????

Anybody throw me an idea or some way to trouble-shoot this, would REALLY appreciate it!

Did you restore your data from a Backup like Time Machine?

Also, what were the error messages you were getting from iPhoto?

OK, i replaced the HD cable and BAM... solved all my issues and the performance is unbelievable, so i guess the cable was slowly going bad for a while. I even reinstalled the original HD that was "thought" to the issue and all is good.

The bottom line is - if you have a SLOW hard drive and/or UNAPPROVED CALLER pop ups, try the HD cable first before replacing the hard drive as its actually a lot less expensive. I have almost 2 weeks of messing with this stuff and spent a few hundred dollars before buying a new cable for $45.

Hope this helps others as this issue was a tuff one to troubleshoot and fix.

Thanks to EVERYONE who offered help!

Steve

🙂

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.