I am going through iPhone Restore Hell at the moment. I have lost the use of my phone for four days – it has been “bricked” by the 3.1.2 Update from Apple. The iPhone rejected the update and now refuses to Restore.
The problem seems to be very widespread and effects Windows XP users only… several solutions have been offered to get the restore working properly, from: holding down Home when connecting the iphone to put it in Restore Mode, to jiggling the buttons to get it into DFU Mode; the usbappl.sys dll has been checked and updated. Every peice of Apple software has been removed and itunes has had a clean install with anti-virus and firewall turned off…
…EVERYTHING has been tried at least twice – and nothing works!
The iPhone hangs on restore saying “Restoring iPhone Software”. After every attempt itunes has to be force-quit – but even after the quit itunes is still running as a process so Windows has to be restarted. My Vaio has been restarted more times in the last three days than in the last three years!
[MP. 13/10/09]
Update: Took it in to Touchwood Apple Store, Solihull, UK, for the second time and they got a new one working for me. The problem is definately Wondows …or definately my Vaio laptop. They were able to Restore/upgrade to 3.1.2 on their Windows bootcamp Mac – A.Ok.
Thanks to those Geniuses I now have an iPhone that works – but I can NEVER EVER recover my Mac iPhone on my Windows machine. Don’t cross the streams…
Mark.
[MP. 14/10/09]