Unapproved Caller

I am glad people are finding solutions for this on their Macs. I had the same issue across 50+ Macs. In no way is it possible that all 50 of them would have a failing hard drive cable at the same time. My previous post regarding clearing the caches in /tmp, followed by a reboot is what worked for me.

It appears that the UNAPPROVED CALLER relates to more than one issue.

So what worked for you, may not work for another.

Try all the tasks first, then last resort, replace the HDD cable!

🙂

I didn't call him a name - a previous poster suggested that those who advocated replacing the hard drive cable were "crack pots" - since we followed that advice, and it worked, we are now happy to be called "crack pots". Get it? If not, read the thread and perhaps then you will. Cheers!

Correct, I have tried everything. But nothing helped except for the HDD cable. It seems strange a HDD cable could be the problem of this but it apparently is!

Clearing the caches didn't work for me. I cleared it, rebooted the system and it came back hour or two later! This solution works for a whole bunch of us as well as clearing the caches did for a bunch others!

I got it 😉 Its okay! I'll happily be a "Crack pot" if only my mac works the way it should!

my badd.... i guess it can be read both ways...i edited my post...🙂

No problem - my post, standing alone, was a bit unclear without the reference point of the prior postings.

Abstert was correct in my case with this issue on an iMac. Thank you!

abstert's fix worked for me on 3 computers.

I imaged three MBs (Intel Core 2Duo, 2GB RAM, Model MacBook6,1, manufacture date 10/20/09) via Deploy Studio (I'm a school tech in a large school district). The image on all three nearly completed but erred, and did not finish sending out the last packages (sent the logs to our engineers already to fix). I'm not sure why it erred, since it was a good image before.

As I was tweaking the computers (binding them to Active Directory, etc) and getting them ready to give to our users, I was just about finished but decided to update the browsers, as this seems to help with sluggishness experienced after upgrading to 10.9. Firefox went just fine, but on each computer, when I did Chrome (I had to download Chrome again because it was too out of date to update itself), the Unapproved Caller message started popping up. I then couldn't do much of anything to try to fix it without the error - I couldn't send the old Chrome to the trash; I couldn't even delete the recommended files.

Here is what I had to do:

1. Hard shut down the computer (hold the power button)
2. Log in with a local user account (I could not log in with my AD account)
3. Finder>Go: /var/folders/ and delete those folders as suggested
4. Reboot computer (but just before I hit the Restart key, I noticed another folder in the Folders folder (wow - that's a mouthful!), so I deleted again for safety sake)

I was again able to log into my network account and finish all the needed tasks (like download Chrome).

After all the troubleshooting I went through, they fixed the image and I had to reimage again, and repeat all the special tweaks. But this time it finished without errors, and, I assume, without the unnecessary folders in /var/folders/. But I had to at least let others know that this fix worked for three of mine, and it sounds similar to others' issues having upgraded or done something to their disk that might have not deleted those havoc-wreaking folders.

Here are some notes for others if the above simple fix doesn't work: Regarding using a Thunderbolt cable to target-disk into - even though your computer may have a display port that fits the Thunderbolt cable, if it doesn't have the lightening symbol on it, it may not be a Thunderbolt port. This is true in the earlier unibody MBPs, and the white MBs that sold without the option of having Firewire. So that could also be a reason for not getting the Target disk symbol upon T-boot of the machine.

Also, if you try using a OS cd and can't get it to eject, holding down the mouse (or track pad) on start-up generally ejects the disk.

Thanks, abstert, for you advice.

I am having the same issue. I have even gone to the Apple service centre and had a clean install of my OS X Yosemite also done. Still problems persist. Computer freezes, apps crash, web pages freeze or refuse to load in Safari and countless other problems.

Hi All,

A few months ago I started getting the unnaproved caller thing, kept popping up all the time and eventually some keychain access stuff, sometimes my mac wouldn't even boot up sometimes it would. Some files couldnt be opened but everything was behaving very randomly, at first i thought i had a virus!

I tried everything from safe booting, resetting stuff holding down multiple keys and all that jazz but nothing would work.

So eventually I gave up and tried wiping the hard drive and installing snow leopard (because I had the disk) This worked for about an hour at a time then programmes like google chrome would randomly crash and not work. I had to restart the machine and it would work again for about half an hour and so on and so on.

I read up online about it and after reading somewhere that it might be the Sata cable/ the cable from your hard drive to the mother board. I was skeptical at first. But my mac was unusable so I took the plunge, ordered the Sata Cable part from amazon, made sure that it was right for my model of mac (13inch, mid 2009, macbook pro) and after installing it I have had no issues. Its like a new machine. The only bit I would warn you about is one of the plugs that attaches the cable is very small so you must take care not to break anything when you do it. It is really easy to do though and all you need to do it is a little philips screwdriver.

Do it! If in doubt change the cable!

The correct way to fix the "Unapproved Caller SecurityAgent may only be invoked by Apple Software" error is to delete the contents of the

/var/folders/ directory.

Most users experience this error when trying to have the system use elevated privileges like unlocking the System Preferences to make changes. This occurs on systems that have recently been upgraded to Mac OS 10.9 Mavericks.

This worked! I started with the Unapproved Caller error this morning on my new MBP. Everything started working oddly...couldn't access certain System Preferences, Safari started acting up, my Common Access Card (CAC) started to fail...then the "Unapproved Caller" error message began to appear. I followed this thread and figured I give this a try first, figuring a hard drive connection fail was possible but not probable. I booted the MBP into my iMac in Target Disk Mode, deleted the contents of the folder you specified, rebooted the MBP. Problem solved. Took only minutes. Username "abstert"...you saved me literally hours of frustration and lost productivity during a very busy time at work. Thank you!

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.

This fixed it. Dont forget to RESTART!

Rebooting in safe mode worked for me too. Problem started after an upgrade.