It has been almost 2 weeks since Apple released iPhone firmware 2.0.1 primarily for bug fixes but based on Apple Discussions boards and news around the blogosphere; it appears that there is still an issue affecting many users of iPhone firmware 2.0 and iPhone firmware 2.0.1. Its now infamously called the "Apple Logo Screen of Death".
You can read all about the "Apple logo screen of Death" problem and how to fix or prevent it after the jump and thus avoid a trip to the Apple Store.
iPhone Atlas describes the problem as follows:
"The problem manifests itself during an app install or update regardless or not it is being done on the iPhone itself or from iTunes. During
either process something interrupts the iPhone and/or iTunes from
completing the task. Then the iPhone spontaneously reboots. The screen
goes dark, comes back on, displays the Apple Logo, and at some point
the iPhone boots and it’s file system mounts. The file system mounting
is noted by two short vibrations, beeps or both. The phone actually
appears in iTunes and if you have an App on your Mac like Phoneview –
you can actually browse the iPhone’s media. iTunes will also display
the “beachball” and stop responding. iTunes usually has to be force
quit in order to get it to respond by relaunching it. The iPhone unfortunately never boots past the Apple Logo."
If you hit this problem it does not mean your iPhone is "bricked". You can resolve it by performing a complete restore on the iPhone by following these instructions:
- Press and hold Sleep/Wake and Home buttons until the iPhone resets.
- When the Apple Logo appears release Sleep/Wake, but do not release the Home button until you see the prompt to "Connect to iTunes".
- Restore your iPhone, but the trick here is restore it not from the backup (as it could be corrupted and very unreliable) but restore as a New iPhone (though the downside is that this process could take a long time for backup and syncing; depending on the applications you have downloaded).
One of the recommendation to prevent this problem is to update iPhone apps
one at a time instead of using "Update All" and avoid doing anything
else on your iPhone while the update process is taking place.
Some iPhone users have reported that they have not been able to plug their iPhone to the computer to sync with iTunes after upgrading to iPhone firmware 2.0.1 and instead hit the "Apple logo screen of death" problem. In case you are facing this problem, you need to put your iPhone into Recovery mode as follows:
- Press and hold the Home button while reconnecting the USB cable. This should kick the iPhone out of its Apple logo screen.
- Let go of the Home button when "Connect to iTunes" shows up on the screen. iTunes will inform you that it’s in the process of recovering the iPhone.
Update:
Please do note that restoring your iPhone as a New iPhone would result in losing your personal data such as text messages, notes, contacts, etc so you will have to manually sync them. It would also remove your application specific data so if you have already played many levels of an iPhone game, restoring the iPhone as new will result in you having to start all over again.
As always do let us know in the comments if this has helped resolve your problem. If you have figure out another way of fixing or avoiding this problem then do let us know in the comments.
[via iPhone Altas and Arstechnica]
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