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I just purchased a brand new iPad Mini 4, and did a full restore from my old iPad Mini 1. After doing this, I noticed that it kept asking me for the iCloud login details for my old Apple ID account. So, I went into iCloud to sign out of the account and sign in with my new one, however since Find my iPad is enabled, it won't sign out of iCloud until that's turned off.

The problem is that the email address associated with it:

  1. doesn't exist, as I erased it about 6 months ago, and;
  2. is (obviously) no longer a valid Apple ID account

So there's no way for me to log into my old account so that I can log out of my old account. I can't even add the old email as a secondary to my Apple ID, because it needs to send a verification email, and the address doesn't exist.

Does anyone know how to solve this?

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  • "(obviously) no longer a valid Apple ID account"? You can't delete an AppleID ever, so that still exists. Your Apple ID does not have to be your current or even a valid email address - you can change the primary email via the web site. If you don't recall the details, start at iforgot.apple.com Also, you cannot use one primary address as the secondary address for another ID. Thirdly, anything purchased under the old ID belongs to that ID, not to your new ID - so the only other way to deal with it is to delete all your old apps.
    – Tetsujin
    Commented Oct 13, 2015 at 18:41
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    The issue wasn't with the Apple ID, it was with iCloud thinking an old email was the Apple ID, and being unable to change that in any way, shape or form. I'll be adding my own answer shortly, but as it happens, after an hour and a half on the phone to Apple Support, I appear to have uncovered a bug with iCloud that has been forwarded on to Apple's iCloud Development Team.
    – indextwo
    Commented Oct 14, 2015 at 9:22
  • Nice bit of detective work :)
    – Tetsujin
    Commented Oct 14, 2015 at 12:44
  • Updated info for iOS 9.0.2 here - including a solution, at last - apple.stackexchange.com/questions/211906/…
    – Tetsujin
    Commented Oct 21, 2015 at 5:42
  • I like the concept @Tetsujin - unfortunately doesn't work in my case. If I change my primary Apple ID at appleid.apple.com to the old email, it errors out, saying the email is already associated with another Apple ID... despite the fact that Apple have no record of it :/
    – indextwo
    Commented Oct 21, 2015 at 11:48

1 Answer 1

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After spending over an hour and a half to Apple UK's support, and eventually getting transferred to a senior advisor from their US-based support, it turns out that I may have uncovered a bug in iCloud that has since been forwarded to the iCloud Development Team.

The old email address had been used as my Apple ID for around 3 years before I changed it. Rather than add an additional one (as I was deleting the old email completely), I change the primary Apple ID; however I neglected to change it for iCloud (I wasn't actually using iCloud for anything, so I didn't think about it). As a consequence, iCloud is still associated with the old Apple ID email, and it wouldn't let me sign out of iCloud unless I signed in with the old Apple ID so I could disable Find my iPad so that I could sign out.

Now, here's the rub: for whatever reason, Apple have no record of the original Apple ID email. None at all. Normally, as @Tetsujin pointed out in his comment, I should be able to sign in to my Apple ID with my old email even though it's no longer associated with my account, because there should still be a record of it on the system. However, because (for whatever reason) it seems to have been completely purged from Apple's records, there is effectively no way for me to actually sign out of iCloud.

Apple have admitted that this never should have happened, and they have passed the details of the case on to the iCloud Development Team... so I may be indirectly responsible for another iOS9 update. Sorry.

In the end, my 'solution' was to abandon the original iPad and set my iPad Mini 4 up as new, manually transferring my apps and settings across, using the old one as a reference.

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  • i am facing the same problem as yours...i am unable to turnoff " find my iphone" cuz in the icloud account i have mistyped the emailid as [email protected] instead of [email protected]. unfortunately the iphone has accepted the id though it is not correct and i cannot signout of it to turn off find my iphone
    – user153651
    Commented Oct 22, 2015 at 10:22
  • @nisha in your case you might want to take a look at this answer, as it may solve your issue: apple.stackexchange.com/questions/211906/…
    – indextwo
    Commented Oct 22, 2015 at 10:28
  • @indextwo Have you had a chance to try resolving this issue on iOS 9.3 or even better 9.3.1?
    – Can Sürmeli
    Commented Apr 1, 2016 at 8:06
  • @CanSürmeli Unfortunately no - as I mentioned above, I circumvented the issue by simply setting up the new iPad manually. This was 6 months ago on iOS 9.0.1 (I think) and it's been fine since then.
    – indextwo
    Commented Apr 1, 2016 at 11:29
  • For future reference: This solved my issue in my mac. Try to do the same in iPad. discussions.apple.com/thread/7806209?start=0&tstart=0
    – Eduardo Pinheiro
    Commented Oct 24, 2017 at 13:04

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