Posts Tagged ‘unbrick apple iphone 4. iphone 4g’
How To Unbrick iPhone
It was Saturday morning. I plugged my iphone into my Mac to charge it up. And I left it to charge. After the battery was shown as fully charged, I was politely informed by iTunes that there was another version of the iPhone OS (and firmware I suspect). Should I load it?
Apple frequently informs me of upgrades and I always take them. Nothing ever seems to go wrong. It’s been that way since I switched to the Mac in 2004. Saturday was the exception.
How My iPhone Became a Brick
The software began to download. I waited. It started loading on the iPhone. Just before it completed it gave me a message.
“Unable to restore iPhone. Error 14 Unknown error”
My iPhone was now a brick. I wasn’t concerned immediately. I just figured it was a random irregularity. I hadn’t jail-broken the iPhone or anything, so it had to be a simple problem. So I tried again. And I got error 14 again. So I went to Apple’s site and read Apple’s suggestion on what to do, such as reboot your Mac/PC then try again, or try it on a different iMac.
I had lost the data on the iPhone, by the way. Once your iPhone is a brick, it gets amnesia and never recovers. You have to reconstitute it. However all data was backed up, so I wasn’t worried.
To cut a long story short, I tried everything Apple recommended, then tried every idea I could find on various iPhone forums. I wasted three hours and all I got was error 14 every time, except once, when iTunes suggested I needed to load different firmware. Well Duh! So I decided to visit the AT&T shop from whence I got the phone.
They were utterly useless. They plugged it it, tried to fix it and gave up after 5 minutes. They knew nothing. I was tempted to tell them that “my phone was now a brick so please replace it.” But I didn’t, because they suggested that I visit the Genius Bar at the local Apple chapel, and I knew that if AT&T gave me a new iPhone there would be hassle in getting it configured to my number. So I went to the local Apple Store, only to discover that I wouldn’t be able to get an appointment with an “Apple Genius” until 11.50 the following day. But never mind, a helpful assistant said he’d see what he coudl do and waltzed off with my Phone. He returned 20 minutes later, to inform me that only a genius could fix it. So I booked in for the following day and went home.
How To Unbrick The iPhone
When I got home, I started to think my way through the problem. I realized I hadn’t done that. I’d just tried every suggestion I’d run into. Most likely the iPhone was corrupted at an OS or firmware level. Quite possibly the download I had originally tried had become corrupt. So, I needed to clean down the phone.
Quite possibly the download I’d loaded was lurking somewhere on my Mac. So this is what I did:
1. I cleaned down the iPhone by putting it in DFU mode (Where DFU stands for Device Firmware Upgrade).
2. I found the download on my Mac and deleted it.
DFU mode. You put an iPhone in DFU mode by doing the following:
* For about 7 seconds keep the “power/lock’ button (top of the phone) and the “home” button pressed – until the iPhone screen goes black.
* Keep them pressed for an extra 2 seconds, then release the “power/lock’ button
* iTunes will then see the the iPhone after about 10 seconds. Now you release the “home” button.
* The iPhone is now in DFU mode.
* You can now reformat the iPhone by reloading everything, but first delete the previous download.
New download. I acquired a valid download by doing the following:
* I went to /library/iTunes/iPhone Software Updates/
* There was a file there which has a name similar to iPhone2,1_3.3.3_7E18_Restore.ipsw. This ipsw file was probably corrupted. So I deleted it. If you don’t delete this, iTunes will try to load it and you’ll have the same problem as before. It all probability, this file is corrupt.
* I restored the iPhone and it worked – because I had reformatted the iPhone and got a fresh update for it.
* Once the iPhone was restored, I reloaded the phone from the last backup.
The only way that this is likely to fail is if the download of the new OS/firmware gets corrupted. So, if it fails, repeat. If this doesn’t work then the odds are that you have a hardware defect and it’s time to get the handset replaced.
The reason I have explained all this is that I couldn’t find an explanation of this on the web. There may be other stuff out there that tells you what to do, but I couldn’t find anything that tells you why you’re doing it.