Can't recognize contents of iPhone... but it's not hacked.

[Dabisu]

I'm visiting my aunt for Christmas, and she asked me to update her iPhone for her. I said no problem, but when I went into iTunes it said it couldn't recognize it and to restore the phone. I did some searching and I've only seen people have this problem if they had a jailbroken or hacked phone. If it was my iPhone, I'd just make a backup of everything I want and just restore it, but because it's not mine and the person using it is very computer illiterate, I want to avoid that.

The phone's version is 2.0.2 and I want to be able to update it, but I haven't had any luck. I restarted both the iMac and the iPhone, updated all the software on the iMac, and still nothing.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!!

Edit:
If I were to just restore it, is there an easy way to back everything up? I saw a guide for backing up and restoring, but it won't give me that option now that iTunes won't recognize it.

 

[abijnk]

If the phone isn't being recognized then something in the software is probably corrupted. A restore is absolutely necessary. iTunes may or may not backup data, but regardless you don't want to use any backed data. If whatever is corrupted gets back in there it will just do the same thing again.

For future prevention I would teach the user how to backup their phone regularly. It's so easy these days that not being tech-savy isn't an excuse.

 

[Dabisu]

Is there anyway to get some of the addresses and texts off? I can still get pictures, but this way we don't have to write everything down.

Oh, and thanks for the response!