Saturday, November 29, 2008

Recovering my bricked iPhone

While updating my series one 16GB iPhone to OS version 2.2 it all went TU.

About 20 percent through the update it crashed out.

After 'ejecting', the iphone was stuck in the 'connect to iTunes' icon state.



On reconnecting the phone to my MacBook I was channeled into the only option which was to restore the iPhone however this crashed out at about 20% on the progress bar with an 'Unable to restore iPhone' error code (14) every time I attempted it.

The fix?

So after surfing a load of blogs and forums and trying various options I found the following worked for me:

I created a new user account on my mac*, logged into it, connected the iPhone and hit restore. Once the phone was successfully 'activated' I disconnected, logged back in to my MacBook with usual account, connected the iPhone and voila. Well, almost - I've found by experience that the restore from backup option never works for me, so I hit the 'set up as new phone' option. This is a pain because it takes ages to resync all my data (mostly podcasts) and I had to go and reset my pone preferences, but in the end I ended up with my iPhone pretty much restored to the way it was before.



*
- Select system preferences from the apple menu (top left)
- open the “Accounts” pane
- click the padlock and enter your admin password
- click the “+” (plus) button to create the new user