It happened to many people before and, knock on wood, it may happen to you too one day. While you update or restore your iPhone or iPod touch your device might go into a never-ending restart loop without displaying the Home screen, it may not complete the update/restore and iTunes will no longer recognize it or, the worst, your device will just stop responding while displaying a plain Apple logo or a stopped progress bar.
If you find yourself in such a situation do not despair. There is a solution to your problem and it is simpler than you think. All you have to do is to place your iPhone / iPod touch in recovery mode and attempt to restore it again.
If you are lucky, in certain situations, your device will take you the easy route and automatically go into recovery mode after experiencing an update or restore problem. If your iPhone or iPod touch is already in recovery mode, you can go ahead and restore it using iTunes.
WARNING: If iTunes displayed an alert with an error code, go to
THIS Apple Support article before going through the procedure presented here.
If you are not one of those lucky people, just go through the following steps to be able to place your iPhone or iPod touch into recovery mode. As stated above the warning message if the device is already in recovery mode, you can jump directly to step 6.
The steps1. Disconnect the USB from your device, and leave the other end of the cable connected to your computer.
2. Turn off the device: Press and hold Sleep/Wake a few seconds until the red slider appears, then slide the slider. If you are unable to turn off your iPhone or iPod touch this way, just press and hold the Sleep/Wake and Home buttons at the same time. Release buttons when the device turns off.
3. With the device turned off press and hold the Home button and reconnect the USB cable to your iPhone / iPod touch. When reconnected with the USB cable, the device should automatically power on. If you will see the screen in the left-hand image, just let the device charge for at least ten minutes to make the battery is charged enough and then start with step 2 again.
4. Hold the Home button until you will see the "Connect to iTunes" screen. When it appears release the Home button.
5. If it is not already opened, open iTunes. You should now see the "recovery mode" alert pictured in the image at the left of this text.
6. All you have to do now is to use iTunes to restore your device (a detailed tutorial on how to do that is available
HERE).
If you don't see the "Connect to iTunes" screen, try the steps again.
NOTE: Although this procedure will allow you to restore your iPhone or iPod touch, keep in mind that all user content on the device will be erased. If you previously synced with iTunes on the computer, you will still be able to restore from a previous backup (go
HERE to see how).
If you encounter any problems during this procedure or you have other related questions share them with us and the rest of the readers in the comments section below.
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