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iphone will not restore Error 21

Here is a little background to this problem. I had an original iPhone that the Wi-Fi quit working on this past week. The phone was 2 1/2 months out of warranty and Apple would not, or could not do anything to help me other than sell me a new 3G. I just purchased the 3G tonight (16g black) and they activated it at the store for me. I made a phone call on the way home and all is good.

I get home and was going to check to make sure the Wi-Fi on the phone worked when all of the sudden the screen goes to the Apple logo and then starts freaking out. A lot of text flies across the screen saying something about a PANIC and Darwin Kernel. I read online all sorts of issues about this, before I finally come across how to start the phone in recovery mode. I finally get it started in recovery mode and hook it up to my PowerBook G4. I click RESTORE and it gives me this message:

The iPhone "iPhone" could not be restored. An unknown error ocurred (21).

I literally had this phone for 1 hour! My original iPhone was a Christmas gift from my wife and it bothered me that it was no longer working, but then to have this happen immediately is sad. Can anyone help? Does anyone have any information about this error or how I can get my phone restored, or should I just take what appears to be a lemon back to the Apple Store?

PowerBook G4, Mac OS X (10.4.7)

Posted on Mar 11, 2009 7:40 PM

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10 replies

Mar 19, 2009 12:05 AM in response to jlowpool

i also had this problem with my iPhone, i put it in the dock, iTunes came up on my MacBook, then the iPhone restarted a white screen came up for about 25 seconds then an Apple came up, then the connect to iTunes logo appeared, I was puzzled as to why this had happened since i'm extremely careful & certainly would not ever jailbreak it, because its against Apple's EULA. So i click restore expecting everything to work, then I get something like "iTunes cannot connect to the iPhone "iPhone" an unknown error accrued error 21. Then i put it in DUF mode, the screen went white again, looked like the firmware was installing then that failed & now its displaying error 2001, what shall I do

iphone will not restore Error 21

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