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2012-11-07

iPhone dead...and back

Today, all of a sudden, the screen of my AT&T iPhone 4S went black and it stopped responding. Hitting home button or pressing and holding 'power' button did not help. I connected it to a power source hoping somehow it just needed some juice yet there was no sign of charging animation on the screen, it was dead.

Then, my colleague suggested the following:
Try putting it in DFU mode to at least see if you can restore it. See instructions below.

  1. Plug your device into your computer.
  2. Turn off the device.
  3. Hold the Power button for 3 seconds
  4. Hold the Home button without releasing the Power button for 10 seconds
  5. Release the Power Button but keep holding the Home button
  6. Keep holding the Home button until you are alerted by iTunes saying that it has detected a device in Recovery Mode

I did and it worked. So, I had my iPhone back but it was as if I just bought it, I had to get my data back as well...

I connected it to iTunes on my Windows 7 x64 and attempted to restore the last backup. I got prompted for the backup password. After entering the password, a process seemed to start but never finished. Instead I kept on getting the following message:
"itunes could not restore the iphone because the iphone was disconnected"

I thought it might have been a bad password, that was not it. Upon entering a different password, iTunes warned me that I had incorrect password.

Then, I wondered if my iTunes was corrupted, that was not it. I downloaded the latest version (10.7.0.21) and chose to fix my version to no avail.

At this point, I was worried that my backup was bad. Instead, it turned out that the fix was to connect the phone to a different usb port. As soon as I switched the usb port, restore started to progress and I got   my settings back.

Restoring did not bring my applications back, but that's easy to fix by choosing the apps to install after launching 'App Store' > 'Updates' > 'Not on This iPhone'