So I now seem to be having a lot of issues.
Yesterday my brother gave me two new WD Caviar 640 GB hard drives, they are previously used and were formatted as FAT 32. I only had 1 extra Sata cable at the time, so I plugged one in.
Then I do a fresh install of Mavericks on my SSD (which has two partitions, one for Windows 7). The install went smoothly. iMessage still wasn't working, but I reformatted the new 640 HHD (still in FAT 32), and it was working fine. I can't distinctly remember doing so, but I feel that I must have rebooted at least once after the reformatting of that HDD. Later after trying the steps for the NVRAM solution a few times with no luck, I changed my password for my Apple ID and that seemed to do the trick. * I also noticed that the actual NVRAM file had a different uuid than previously (it had always been nvram.00020003-0004-0005-0006-000700080009.plist), and I believe that's what made it finally work because when I had tried to do this before the reinstall, the uuid in that file had always remained the same and didn't match the one from the smbios.plist.
This morning, I turned on my computer and it wouldn't boot up. It got through the motherboard screen, and instead of going to the boot screen it was just black with _/ at the top left corner. I unplugged the new HDD and rebooted and it started up just fine, but iMessage was no longer working. I decided to plug in the OTHER HDD. It started up fine (it was formatted in FAT 32 as well), I reformatted to get the proper name but kept it in FAT 32. I shut down and plugged both of the new 640s in and started up, and it wouldn't boot. I unplugged both, and it still wouldn't boot. I unplugged two of my other HDDs (I thought I had them all but realized I forgot one), but it started up fine. iMessage still isn't working.
But onto the real iMessage part of this. I looked in the /Extra folder, and noticed there are two NVRAM files. The correct one, and nvram.00020003-0004-0005-0006-000700080009.plist again. I deleted the wrong one and rebooted. When I opened the /Extra folder, it was there again and instead of getting the "An error occurred during activation. Try again." message, I can sign in but it says that my contacts aren't registered, so it's back to the original iMessage issue, and I believe it's because of that NVRAM file that keeps showing up.
How do I stop that from coming up again?
And if any one has any ideas about the HDDs... I'm really at a loss. I am not very experienced with computers and am not quite sure what I should be doing. I'm going to unplug all but my SSD and then try rebooting that with one other HDD at a time to see if I can figure out which ones have an issue and see if I can somehow do something about it.