I had a bit of a scare tonight with a jammed iPhone that would not boot and being miles away from an Apple store I was out of options. After doing the whopping big update to v 2.01 late tonight the wifi router with remote hard drive went down, along with it my connected iTunes library causing iTunes to crash, right at the golden moment while the phone was updating and rebooting. Oh noooo! Even after I struggled with cables in tight spaces and resurrected the network by plugging directly into the router to get iTunes up again, the phone wasn’t even unrecognisable. The best my laptop could offer was that my shiny phone was an “unrecogniseable USB hub that may be malfunctioning”. iTunes had even folded up its usual iPhone parking space as if its own child had never played in its yard. A reboot of the laptop yielded no change. Plugging the iPhone into the power outlet didnt help either. The frozen Apple logo wouldn’t go away. I wondered if the battery could last long enough to drive down to an Apple store in the RV some time this week. It seemed unlikely. I was tired, defeated and sadder than I was the second day of school.

Then a simple search into Google, namely “iphone frozen unrecognizable won’t restart” yielded a wonderful surprise:
Restart a Frozen iPod or iPhone and
My iPod / iPhone won’t mount or update. Bingo!
(Note there are sadly some adult ads on the side that may offend some)

Lots of super simple advice to follow. And after my iphone rebooted a few times and was plugged in and out a few times it finally remembered who it was and what to do next.

Finally I can go to sleep without worrying about having lost a quarter of my brain. Good night all!