"You can’t sign in at this time. Try signing in again” when trying to sign in at iCloud System Preferences panel

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"You can’t sign in at this time. Try signing in again” when trying to sign in at iCloud System Preferences panel

This is not a question. This is me trying to offer useful info to the community for any users who may find themselves in my situation.

If you encounter errors logging in to iCloud, especially after a failed, or forced, log out of iCloud on your Mac (for instance, if you followed the advise found around here for using “defaults delete MobileMeAccounts”, and are left with a machine that can’t log in to iCloud due to getting the message in the title), the solution (in my case) may be for you to replace the /Library/Keychain content with that from a FRESH OS install.

Note: that’s the Library Keychain found in the root of the drive. NOT your user Keychain Library.

My OS: High Sierra (final version).

My Mac: iMac 12,2

This hardware and software aren’t supported by Apple. They will only advise you to reinstall, or wipe out the system with a fresh installation. A reinstall over the existing OS does NOT fix this problem because it does not replace the root /Library/Keychain. A full system reinstall is NOT necessary so long as you have access to a fresh (or working) OS boot volume with the appropriate freshly installed root /Library/Keychain content (mine was an external USB hard drive that I installed High Sierra on for testing and troubleshooting a previous iCloud sync issue).

I don’t know if this will work for you, but this did work for me after everything else failed to, and it did NOT require a user’s entire system to be reinstalled from scratch!

Good luck!

iMac 27″, macOS 10.13

Posted on Apr 9, 2022 9:25 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Jace Cavacini Author

Level 1

58 points

Apr 10, 2022 11:28 AM in response to tygb

How are you adding to this conversation? I did not advise deleting the Keychain folder. I advised replacing potentially corrupted Keychain content with that from a fresh OS install.

As for only doing this with advice from Apple Support, this was a solution I discovered in spite of Apple Support being unwilling to help. That’s the whole point: Apple does not offer granular assistance for problems like this when the OS and/or computer is “obsolete”. The only thing they suggest is a totally new OS install, causing a user to have to spend considerably more time and effort on rebuilding their system than the suggestion I’ve made above.

“Always erase the hard drive” is NOT good advice for people who can solve the problem with a more granular approach! I have a whole music studio of software and hardware configured on my system, and plenty of other people do too. We don’t want to “nuke” the entire system and start over again just to fix something that could be fixed with LESS INVASIVE methods!

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Answer 2

tygb

Level 9

64,708 points

Apr 10, 2022 12:23 AM in response to Jace Cavacini

Click on finder > Go > Computer > Macintosh HD > Library > from here the keychain folder is deleted in very rare scenarios only when you are touch with apple support senior care advisors and for every Mac the problems will differ .

Generally keychain folder from system library is never deleted , this can corrupt more of operating system .

Always consult apple support Contact Apple for support and service - Apple Support

If they require log details / sys diagnostic report , things can change ( their engineering team might give solutions ) .

But from the Mac user end , always erase the hard drive and reinstall Mac OS .

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