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izzy0242mr

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jul 24, 2009
691
491
Any time I try logging in to FaceTime and iMessage, I get an error: "An error occurred during activation. Please try again later."

I've heard of this problem before, and the only solution seems to be creating an entirely new user account. However, if I migrate my old account from a Time Machine backup, the problem carries through to the new account. I can't copy files in my Home folder from the old account to the new account without running into a ton of permission issues, and I'm not entirely sure what all I *need* to backup from my home/Library folder other than a few specific folders in Application Support. (I tried this yesterday and changing a mass amount of folder permissions is a real pain and takes forever – not to mention, if you copy stuff from your old Library folder, it causes the "OS X needs to repair your library" error constantly.)

Any suggestions? It seems like since the error doesn't persist on a new user account, but does persist when migrating data, the issue is somewhere in my home/Library folder and should be fixable by deleting files or something. But so far, I've not found any helpful suggestions on what those files might be.
 

Derived

macrumors 6502
Mar 1, 2015
315
207
Midwest
This is not related to the recent outage, there's a multi-page thread on the Apple forums where many people have been having this issue for months. Just purchased a Mac Pro 5,1, moved my user folder over from my 2012 cMBP (which was perfectly functional on 10.11.6) and I cannot get iMessage to work at all. I get the exact same error. I'm on the retail build of .5, nothing special. Also, have noticed that every time I reboot I have to log back in to iCloud.

UPDATE: Did a PRAM reset based on advice from someone on the Apple forums, and it worked. So, if you're having any issues, give that a shot.
 
Last edited:

DebH

macrumors newbie
Jun 7, 2017
1
0
This is not related to the recent outage, there's a multi-page thread on the Apple forums where many people have been having this issue for months. Just purchased a Mac Pro 5,1, moved my user folder over from my 2012 cMBP (which was perfectly functional on 10.11.6) and I cannot get iMessage to work at all. I get the exact same error. I'm on the retail build of .5, nothing special. Also, have noticed that every time I reboot I have to log back in to iCloud.

UPDATE: Did a PRAM reset based on advice from someone on the Apple forums, and it worked. So, if you're having any issues, give that a shot.
How do you do a PRAM reset?
 
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