Recovering the iPhone 3G from the White Apple Logo of Death
The other night I was playing with my iPhone 3G and decided to see if there were any new applications worth downloading from the App Store.
I launched the App Store and was immediately notified that there were 18 updates waiting for my installed applications. I’ve learned my lesson before about updating too many at a time–it takes too long and also crashes sometimes–so I chose to just update the Tetris one. The process was straight forward and did its usual asking me for my password, etc. and then it started the download. After the download was complete it started installing the Tetris application. After about two minutes I glanced over to see if it was complete and noticed that it was still in the installing mode. Before I could do anything the iPhone rebooted and then showed me the white Apple logo.
After about five minutes of waiting for it to go beyond the Apple logo, I started to get a bit concerned. I had encountered this in the past and normally a reboot or two and worst case connecting it to my Mac brings the iPhone back to life. So, I did a couple of reboots and it still hung on the white Apple. I then hooked it to my Mac and it launched iTunes and then hung iTunes–uh oh.
I got WALD
Some Googling later and I came to find out that there’s a name for the behavior that my iPhone 3G was exhibiting: “WALD”, or White Apple Logo of Death.
Thankfully, a few searches on Google led me to this page which basically told me to put the iPhone into DFU (Device Firmware Update) mode and perform a Restore. As for putting the iPhone in DFU mode, with the iPhone off, connect it to your computer and hold down the power and home buttons at the same time. When the Apple logo appears, release the power button but continue holding the home button down.
Restored … almost
I did as instructed and then clicked Restore when my iPhone was recognized by iTunes. Then about 10 minutes later the iPhone finally restored and rebooted.
Re-activate?
I forgot that the new iPhone requires a SIM to be installed to activate it. Unfortunately for me, I didn’t have the SIM installed so the iPhone went into Emergency Mode. I figured I still had nothing to lose so I unplugged the iPhone from my Mac, powered it down, and then popped the SIM in. Then I hooked the iPhone back up to the Mac and iTunes activated it and then prompted me to set it up as a new iPhone or restore from a previous backup. I had made a backup at 3pm the day before so I chose the restore option.
Might as well go to sleep
Let’s recap for a minute. The iPhone was now fully functional again, after performing a factory Restore, but it didn’t have any of my information on it. So far the process had taken about 10 minutes. Next up, though, was the process of restoring from a backup. If you haven’t done this before, since Apple released Apps on the App Store, restoring and backing up the iPhone takes FOREVER. In my case, I chose the restore option and then watched as iTunes said that it was “Restoring iPhone from backup”.
This process required a lot of patience since iTunes says it’s restoring but the iPhone doesn’t, then the iPhone finally says “restore in progress” and iTunes has a very long progress meter that INCHES along.
As you can see from the screenshots below, this restore from backup took a VERY LONG time.
As of 9:37pm
11:35pm–restore finished a minute later
About 2.5 hours in and my iPhone was finally restored. I haven’t had the guts to try to install the Tetris update again but for now the iPhone 3G is fully functional.
Another thing this iPhone experience has taught me is to really re-think my iPhone usage. I find that the majority of what I do is data and Apps, so an iPod Touch, without a monthly plan, is probably more than enough.
While my iPhone 3G was down for the count I used the BlackJack II with Windows Mobile 6.1. I find myself appreciating the phone experience on the BlackJack II so much more that I still haven’t switched back to the iPhone 3G. We’ll see what tomorrow brings.
