Outside Look

Phew, what an afternoon. Hopefully someone can find this frustrating experience useful.

I picked up my iPhone this afternoon and found it had apparently spontaneously rebooted and was hung on the boot screen with the Apple logo. A few home+sleep/wake reboot cycles with no change left me quite concerned. The best choice seemed to be to force a restore, which was the best advice I could find from the net.

As seems to be the case for many (though most often with jailbroken iPhones, which mine was not), I got an “unknown error (6)” during the restore process. I’ve had this before, but the cycle twice (three, four times) route didn’t work. Apple’s support document on unknown error (6) turned out not to help at all - I tried each one, in order, in hopes of success. I would recommend trying these steps before doing anything else though, there’s a pretty good chance they will work. Throughout this process, the restore process would get to 10-25% done and pop the “unknown error (6)” message.

After additional Google searching, there were suggestions to switch USB cables, USB ports, and even turning to tools like iBrickr. Here’s what worked for me, I’m not sure all factors are significant, but it worked:

• Realized I was using an old iPod cable, switched to the original iPhone cable
• This time the restore process got to 100% before presenting the “unknown error (6)”
• Unplugged the iPhone, did a home+sleep/wake reset
• Received the ‘plug in USB cable screen’
• Plugged the USB cable in and allowed the restore to move forward, and OMG! It worked

This led to great relief, and a martini made with the best vodka ever - Ruski Standart Platinum.

I hope this doesn’t happen to others, but if it does, I hope this will help you sort it out. I haven’t figured out why this worked, or what was wrong with the Apple approaches, but for some reason it did.