a word of caution re: resets

[joelk]

doing a hard reset (holding the "power" button and the home button simultaneously) can seriously screw up OS files on your iPhone to the point where it will not restart properly so do it only as a last resort.

my story has a happy ending but i thought i'd relay that little bit of caution. i was synching with iTunes and iTunes said that it was okay to disconnect. I disconnected the phone and it froze ... unresponsive to any input. tried a few other things but then decided to do the hard reset (power/sleep button and home button) and when i restarted the phone i got a bunch of text and a command prompt ... like you are in unix or something.

what happened was doing the hard reset probably ended up corrupting a file that made it impossible to reboot the phone as usual.

i thought it was a gonner but i took it to my local apple store and they did a complete clean install of the firmware and it is back to normal now - sans things that weren't backed up onto my home computer. i was very impressed with the guys at my genius bar.

soooooo first try holding the "sleep/power" button for a few seconds until the shut off slider for power off shows up ... only do the hard reset as a very last resort.

i'm sure this is obvious to many but i thought i would warn those who might not realize this.

best regards.

 

[note235]

did this and was scared
i did a HR and seems to slow everthing down
will do a new reset firmware
they did the restore thing right?

 

[joelk]

did this and was scared
i did a HR and seems to slow everthing down
will do a new reset firmware
they did the restore thing right?

Mine just wouldn't boot up after the H.R. ... there was a bunch of text explaining something about a corrupt file and a command prompt.

I took it in ... the guy asked me if i had everything backed up and i told him that i did ... he could erase everything as long as it worked again

So I believe he just completely re-wrote the memory on the phone with a clean image of the software. The phone then auto-activated with At&T ...we tested it out to make sure everything was fine ...

I then took it home and hooked it up to iTunes. iTunes then offered to reinstall everything it remembered being on my phone.

sooooo happy it didn't have to be sent off. i think the lesson i learned from this is to be more patient. when it "froze" it was synching up a ton of info and i think there was a lag ... had i set it down and come back later it prob would have been fine.

is your's okay now?

 

[ssh]

I bet the file was corrupted when you disconnected from iTunes at the wrong time, not when you did the reset. That's my 2 cents, anyway...

 

[joelk]

I bet the file was corrupted when you disconnected from iTunes at the wrong time, not when you did the reset. That's my 2 cents, anyway...

possibly so ... although iTunes did give the all clear it was safe to remove the phone ... so i don't agree that i "disconnected from iTunes at the wrong time."

knowing nothing about how their process occurs, it would seem that the "all clear" from iTunes should happen once the final file is written to the phone and the session is closed and not merely when iTunes completes sending the files outbound.

who knows. the apple support guy said it was a bad idea to do hard resets unless there are no other options but who knows...

i will agree that the initial lock-up (or apparent lock-up) seems to suggest you might be on to something; however i suspect it had something to do with moving 500+ files at once.

 

[SheepNutz]

I had to do a hard reset on my wife's iPhone the other day since itunes locked up during a sync. It seemed to be just fine after that.

 

[joelk]

I had to do a hard reset on my wife's iPhone the other day since itunes locked up during a sync. It seemed to be just fine after that.

glad to hear that. it was a pita having to hike back to apple.