Thursday, July 31, 2008 -- 3:16 p.m. -- Downtown Chicago

My apologies for not posting earlier. I had a doctor's appointment and some things to take care of. Plus, I wanted to respond to your comments.

Since last night, I have received nearly 40 emails telling of 7.7.1 iTunes crashes and in many cases, iPhone crashes on sync.

If all else fails, use recovery mode:

1. Turn off your iPhone if it isn't already.

2. Make sure iTunes is launched.

3. Hold the center button and while holding, plug your iPhone into your computer.

4. Keep holding until you get a message saying that iTunes has detected an iPhone in recovery mode.

5. Follow steps given to restore from backup.

Provided you have a good and recent backup, your iPhone should be repopulated with everything you had before. You'll need to sync photos and music again; what recovery basically does is reinstall the iphone OS.

Always attempt a restore first before recovery. Sometimes that's all you need. And even before that, simply try a hard reset where you hold down the center button and the sleep/wake switch until the iPhone reboots. Many problems can be solved at this level.

If recovery mode doesn't work, I'm afraid a call to Apple is your next step.

I hope this helps. Even though some of you have reported success, and that's great, I do not believe that iTunes 7.7.1 is ready for primetime.

I'm out of town this weekend but will keep up of course with any breaking news and let you know of any either via the blog or Twitter. So if you haven't signed up at www.twitter.com/iptib yet, you should.

Please keep me updated on how things are going with you, whether it has to do with 7.7.1 or anything else.

Thanks for calling.

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I took the risk of updating my iTunes to see what would happen. The install went well, the program itself, and even my iPhone sync. I haven't had any problems yet with it.

Thanks to your post a while back about sync time and the possibility that because your apps might not match from your phone to your computer, I've been keeping all my apps updated and the same on both. My syncs are a few minutes at most, unless I'm adding something new.

I haven't had very many problem with my iPhone. No cracks, some crashing and random rebooting and signal problems, but either than that the hardware and other things have been rather smooth. Good luck with yours

SCOTT'S REPLY: Excellent news, Christopher. Glad to hear it.

Scott,

I upgraded last night and synced twice without problems. Still a short back-up time. I still only add apps and music through iTunes and sync in only one direction. Not sure if that is what keeps things simple.

hoping this gets resolved quickly for people and hope that my luck holds out

Neil

SCOTT's REPLY: This makes me happy, Neil. When I download apps, I do them ALL on the phone and sync to iTunes. I would think that qualifies as one direction, right? Still crazy long syncs for me, but I have not upgraded to 7.7.1.

I upgraded yesterday (had version 1.1.4 working flawlessly) and since this fatal day, my iphone is in jail.
I cannot use any of its previous functions nor my contacts numbers. Nothing!. Is like it went to a frozen state!
I did tried to restore it using Itunes 7.7 but seems that nothing work. I even tried unsuccesfully a program called *Winpwn 2.0.0.3* also failed to restore my iphone.
What should I do besides let my iphone in letargic mode. Cannot send it to Apple.
Thank You

SCOTT'S REPLY: I'm sorry, Izzy. I can't help with jailbroken iPhones simply because i have no idea how to even go about troubleshooting jailbroken iPhones. There are plenty of other forums online that can get a lot closer for you than I can. Best of luck.

My iPhone locked up with just the white apple on the screen. Rebooting did nothing, so I used your trick to recover my iphone. Then I restored from the lastest backup. It worked with not music, photo, or videos, but now iTunes 7.7.1 doesn't recognize my iphone as anything but a device ready for restore. I get that same "Set up your iPhone" screen and can't sync. Any thoughts?

Thanks,

Alex

SCOTT's REPLY: Well, in my trick, you do have to restore your iPhone. That's the next step -- to restore from backup. You'll lose your music and photos and videos and need to resync them again. Once you get to recovery mode, you are as far as you can get before having to send it/bring it to Apple for service.

I had to get a complete new phone because i couldn't hear anything on mine. I had done a recent sync and backup. When I tried to re-sync the new hardware (phone), it did not sync my phone numbers--only my outlook with email accounts...no pictures or phone numbers....what did i do wrong? It was a pretty abnormal sync--like it didn't recognize me as the same user...is there any hope for recovering my numbers? It synced all my music????

SCOTT'S REPLY: You didn't do anything wrong, Claudia. It sounds like the iPhone skipped part of the sync process. As far as recovering your numbers, were those numbers on your computer at all or did you enter them on your PC? Sadly, if you entered them on your computer, tried to sync and were unsuccessful and the numbers don't reside anywhere -- like on Outlook or MobileMe, then sadly, no, there's not much hope you'll get them back.

I just got my iPhone 3G (8GB) 6 hours ago, and I was able to sync it up once then it downloaded an update. Now it says its in recovery mode and the only option I have is to restore. Its been restoring for the past 3 hours. Is there a way around this? What's wrong with it?

SCOTT'S REPLY: It's hard to say with that much information. You just got a new iPhone and you synced it successfully? Is that right? And then there was an update and now it's in recovery mode? What was the update that you downloaded? Recovery mode can take several hours, so 3 hours isn't necessarily bad, but clearly it's not good.

So I need a little more information to answer your question correctly.

That's really all the information I have. I synced it up, and then it said it has an update so I downloaded it. Then I got a couple applications from the app store. I'm not sure if its the applications (wordpress and a german translator). Since then its been in this "recovery mode" and its been trying to restore for the past 6+ hours now. Its so frustrating. :(

SCOTT'S REPLY: Well, no, the app wouldn't be to blame here. If you are unable to get it to restore, I would recommend a trip to an Apple store if possible. What you describe is not normal.

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