I had to have a new hard-drive installed on my MacBook and now it is running the lated version of iOS (El Capitan). I restored it from a backup that I had from 2013 that had all of my music/most of my files but still had ichat. Now messages doesn't work. Any idea how to fix that?
MacBook Pro, OS X El Capitan (10.11)
Might be a corrupt .plist.
Do a backup, preferably 2 backups on 2 separate drives.
Quit the application.
Go to Finder and select your user/home folder. With that Finder window as the front window, either select Finder/View/Show View options or go command - J. When the View options opens, check ’Show Library Folder’. That should make your user library folder visible in your user/home folder. Select Library. Then go to Preferences/com.apple.iChat.plist. Move the .plist to your desktop.
Restart the computer, open the application and test. If it works okay, delete the plist from the desktop.
If the application is the same, return the .plist to where you got it from, overwriting the newer one.
If that doesn’t work, repeat the above but delete the com.apple.imagent.plist
Thanks to leonie and Ralph Johns (UK)for some information contained in this.
Restored my mac from a backup that had ichat and now messages won't work
