Apple id tied to old mobile.me account

[JoeTech]

A friend of mine finally decided to break down and get a new ipad after her super old ipad would no longer be supported. The problem is that she was still using a mobile.me email for her apple id. I believe mobile.me was shut down in 2012 and she no longer has access to that account.

Instead of setting up the ipad as a new ipad, she restored from a backup and because of that it is using that old mobile.me account. She can't sign out because she no longer has access to that account. I tried Iforgot.apple.com and requested account recovery through a trusted device and filled out the extra information it asked for. It said it would be a few days but it has been about a month now without any instructions sent to her phone.

I did get the option to recover account by entering the pin code for her phone, but of course she didn't have a pin code set up so I when it asks, I have nothing to enter and you can put in a blank pin code. Do I just have to wait until apple finally sends the information or is it something she has to take to the apple store to fix? I haven't been able to find any workarounds and it seems her account is now locked after too many attempts.

 

[Markverhyden]

From what I remember MobileMe functions were all migrated to iCloud. If you go to me.com it resolves to icloud.com. I just sent an email to my old me.com account and it showed up under the icloud.com account. Does she not know what her password is? Is the old iPad still running? This may be something where she needs to go to the Apple Store.

 

[JoeTech]

She doesn't know what her password is for the mobile.me account since she stopped using that email account a few years ago. The old ipad is still working but it keeps asking for a password every 10 seconds and also the new ipad is asking for the same mobile.me password as well.

 

[Krynn72]

Was the backup done with iTunes? If so, it may be easier to set up the iPad as new with a whole new account and just extract the data from the backup then transfer it over yourself. If she didn't know her password then she likely doesn't have any purchased apps either (which of course would not be recoverable from the backup).

 

[JoeTech]

I'm not sure how it was done. She has an Iphone 6 with a different apple id and I was trying to sign out of both ipads and reset them as new to that apple id, but it won't allow me to reset them without the mobile me password because find my ipad is enabled. It also seems that her iphone now just showed up as signed in with the old mobile.me account instead of her new account which I have no clue how that would happen.

Sounds like she might have to take all 3 to the apple store. The only problem is it is a couple hours away so it won't be fun if they can't help her.

 

[Markverhyden]

Yeah, if she did a restore from backup and had find my idevice turned on it makes things very difficult. On the new iPad have you tried to put it into DFU mode and then connect it to iTunes to do a restore to factory settings?

 

[JoeTech]

I tried hooking the new ipad up to a pc and putting it in recovery mode but still required the password.

I have been talking with her through text messages and she decided to call apple support directly. They said it must have downloaded old backups from icloud when trying to sync. They also said that each time you try to get your password, it resest your account recovery process and you are starting over again so they told her not to do anything with them for a few days and she should get a recovery code to reset everything and if not to call them back so it sounds like the apple store would be able to help her. Thank you both for your help.

 

[NviGate Systems]

Yes, if you restore a backup that was previously an iCloud linked device, the new device gets locked to that ID. That is a huge bug in my opinion, it should verify you are that user before turning the lock on. A person could use such a method as a means of attack (albeit it has to be done physically unless you con someone into doing it) to lock a device holding it ransom.