iPhone stuck in restore cycle

[silverswingman]

This is the original iPhone and I am running latest ITunes (7.7.1) and Firmware (2.0 I think, but I cannot check as you will see). I am running ITunes on Windows XP.

My WiFi would not connect today, and frankly has been flakey since updating to Firmware 2.0. So I decided to restore the iPhone, and accepted making a back up first. It restored fine and then presented me the "Set Up Your iPhone" screen where it offers you two choices:
- Set up as a new iPhone
- Restore from the backup of <PhoneName, date>

I chose to restore from backup of latest date.
Back up proceeded and finished with the final reboot of the phone, and the iphone reappeared with the correct name in itunes ... but the "Set Up Your iPhone" screen is still there, instead of the screen that shows what is on my iphone. I tried hitting the continue button again ... but it restores from back up all over again. And again.

I then tried ejecting my Iphone and my apps and contacts are all there ... but no iPod content ... which of course I cannot load until I get the iPhone content screen, instead of the "Set Up Your iPhone".

I am about to try a restore from a previous date, which should not lose me too much data.

Any other ideas?

Thanks

 

[silverswingman]

Restoring from earlier date worked

I found that there were four backups to choose from, two from yesterday, one from January 2008 and one from 2007. Restoring from either of yesterdays left ITunes back at the Setup Your iPhone screen. When I tried the one from January 2008, it worked! Strangely, I still have all my appstore apps, but the icons are in the wrong place. I guess that makes sense since the apps are in iTunes but the icon positions were in the backup.

Now I just have to wait half an hour for the IPod section to finish its sync.

One other thing, my Wifi had not worked for the last several weeks. After the restores from yesterday, it still did not work. With the restore from Jan 2008, it is connecting again fine on my home network. Go figure.

I hope this helps someone else in a similar hell.

 

[Cjtr]

Put youre iphone in recovery mode
to do this:
1- turn youre iphone off
2- while off hold the home button and plug in the cable
3- restore with itunes

 

[No-Nonsense]

Back up proceeded and finished with the final reboot of the phone, and the iphone reappeared with the correct name in itunes ... but the "Set Up Your iPhone" screen is still there, instead of the screen that shows what is on my iphone. I tried hitting the continue button again ... but it restores from back up all over again. And again.

Same problem here with iPhone Classic. I had to restore because of my iPhone hanging on the boot screen. After the restore I chose to restore the backup. The iTunes still asked how to handle the phone (as new or to restore from a backup). Finally iTunes did a backup after the restore, because it now only promts me to restore a backup from today. And I do not get this backup restored on my phone anymore.

It seems I have to restore the firmware again and then remove all backups from iTunes and start over again... Thanks Apple! My first and probably last Apple product...

Why doesn't iTunes save the last n backups? Why doesn't iTunes allow partial restore of backups (e.g. only my contact list)?

The sync with the address book (either Windows or Google Contacs) doesn't recover all contacts data (e.g. birthdays, photos).

-Jens

 

[DipDog3]

Solved!!

I FOUND THE SOLUTION.

I had this exact same problem. I restored my phone and then restored from my backup, but then every time I reconnected to iTunes, it asked to setup my phone again! I restored from the backup again, and it still asks me to restore from backup every time.

To fix this, just setup the iPhone up as a "New Device" (after restoring from backup), and give it whatever name you want. This didn't delete anything on my phone that was put on by the "restore from backup". Only thing is that some of you sync settings may change.

 

[schooby41]

See this thread for the same issue:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/538094/

Doing a force-quit of iTunes, restarting iphone, plugging back into computer also seems to fix the issue. See the thread for details.