Fixing a frozen, zonked, or dead iPhone or iPod Touch

Tuesday, August 5th, 2008
by lepton

Are your Apple iPhone apps crashing? Freezing? Is your iPod Touch stuck? There are various things you can try to get back to normal. Here are some of them, in order from least to most disruptive:

Restart

If things appear sluggish, or apps that normally work just quit as soon as you start them, you can restart your iPhone or iPod Touch. Normally, you don’t restart your device, you merely use the sleep/wake button on top of the device to put it to sleep. This will clear out any stray chunks of memory applications may have left behind, re-establish connections, and generally clean things up.

Power Off Screen

To do this, hold down the sleep/wake button on top of the device for about five seconds, until a “Slide to power off” control appears. Slide the control, and the iPhone will gracefully shut down its services, giving them a chance to clean up, and then turn off. This takes several seconds. While it is shutting off, the screen goes black except for a spinning activity indicator.

To turn the device back on, press the sleep/wake button as usual. But instead of instantly coming back to life, the system starts up fresh. You will see a white Apple appear for several seconds, while everything starts. When the Home screen appears, you are in business with some very tidy system internals. Hopefully those apps will be working fine again!

Restarting your device is harmless and seems to help if things seem sluggish, so feel free to do it every once in a while.

Force Quit

If an application seems stuck, you can force it to quit. To do this, hold down the Home button for about ten seconds. If this succeeds, the home screen will appear. This forces the current application to quit immediately, without being given a chance to save what it was working on, so the very last thing it was doing may not be saved. But except for that, everything should be fine and your application and its data should still be ok. This is the same thing as typing Option-Command-Escape on the Macintosh and force quitting an application in the resulting dialog.

Force Restart

If forcing an application to quit doesn’t work - you’ve held down the Home button for over ten seconds and the Home screen hasn’t appeared - you can Interrupt the computer and force it to restart. To do this, hold down both the Home and sleep/wake buttons for about five seconds. The screen will go black, then a white Apple will appear, then after a couple of moments, the Home screen will appear and you are back in business.

This procedure is like a super Force Quit, in that it forces both the current application and the system itself, to quit, without giving either a chance to exit gracefully, save, or clean things up. So like the Force Quit procedure, some of the most recent things that were changed may not be saved. But except for that, everything should be fine once the system restarts.

Restore

If a Force Restart procedure doesn’t work, your device might really be messed up. If your device seems dead and just plain won’t turn on, make sure it is charged! The charger might have been unplugged, or the cable might be broken or have a bad connection. But if the hardware seems good, you might try recovering all the software to the state when it was last backed up. 

If you’ve been connecting to iTunes on a regular basis, it’s extremely likely you have a backup of everything on your device in your computer, as iTunes makes one whenever you sync. So even though a Restore will wipe the device clean, it will immediately afterward load in a fresh copy of the operating system, and all your data, including music, podcasts, video, mail, settings, and everything else. So at the end of this procedure, which can take significant time, you should be in exactly the same place as when you last successfully synced.

To do a Restore, use the cable and connect your device to iTunes. If your device isn’t recognized by iTunes, try the “Forced Recovery” procedure below. In the Summary tab for your device is a “Restore” button. Click it. You are asked to confirm the procedure. Once things start going, just let the device sit as iTunes does everything.

First it will download a copy of the latest operating system if it doesn’t happen to have one. Then it will erase your device. Then it will load the operating system in. Then it will verify that the system was properly written into the device. Then it will restart the device. You will see a dialog box, just let it go, things continue automatically.

Eventually it will show a set up message, asking if you would like to set up as a new device, or restore from a previous backup. You want to tell it to restore from a backup. If there are multiple backups, the most recent one should already be selected in the popup menu. Click the Continue button and away it goes, copying all your stuff back into the device.

After a possibly lengthy process of copying, your device should be good as new! Or at least as good as it was before this mess happened.

Forced Recovery

If your device is so seemingly dead that iTunes won’t even recognize the device exists when you plug it in to a cable while iTunes is running, you can resort to a forced recovery. To do this, turn your device off if possible. Now press the Home button and hold it, then press the Sleep/Wake button, and keep holding both of them until you see the white Apple appear, just like in “Force Restart”. But, don’t let go when you see the white Apple. Keep holding both buttons for about thirty seconds, and eventually you will see a screen showing a USB plug and indicating you should connect to iTunes. At this point you can let go of the buttons. [Update: If you try this and never seem to get to the recovery screen, try it again but with the sync cable hooked up. I believe with the newest system, this might be necessary to get to recovery mode.]

iPhone in Recovery Mode

You have forced your phone into recovery mode. This is about the same state that it was in when it first came out of the box. The device won’t do anything until you plug in the cable and run iTunes. iTunes should display a message that says it sensed a device in recovery mode, and should it restore the device? At this point you can do a restore as described in the “Recover” section. You should be back in business!

Call for a genius!

Wow. Your device seems dead and iTunes won’t recognize it, and it won’t even go into Forced Recovery mode? Then it’s time to call for a genius! That’s what Apple likes to call its technicians over at the Apple Stores. You can make an appointment over at the apple.com site, or give Apple a call at their service line. If your device is a goner, well, you may still be under warantee, and they should swap your phone for a new one, which you should be able to restore to prime condition toot suite, with all your backed up data!

Good luck with your iPhone or iPod Touch!

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