itunes always wants to restore iphone or setup as new

When you restore from backup your mail settings, text messages, notes, call history, contact favorites, sound settings, widget settings, certain network settings, and other preferences including settings and data from third-party applications purchased from the App Store will be restored from the backup. Your music, videos, and applications will be reloaded by iTunes as they were before the restore.

If you have lost applications purchased on your phone that were not synced to iTunes, you can download them again as described here: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2519

Since the phone is in recovery mode, something went wrong. The data on your phone is not useable. You don't have any other options except to start over as a new phone or restore from backup.

And after you have restored from backup, everything should then sync as usual from that point forward...

FWIW, I am having a very similar issue. I have a first gen iPhone, and ever since upgrading to 3.0 I am having sync issues when connecting to iTunes. Mac OS X 10.5.7 and iTunes 8.2.

I'd say that 90% of the time I plug it into my MacBook iTunes reports an error that "itunes cannot read the contents of the iphone", which requires me to restore it.

I've already restored 4 times, but still have the same issue repeatedly.

Is iPhone OS 3.0 not fully compatible with 1G iPhones?

I was thinking about picking up a new 3GS, but this issue combined with the idea of being stuck with AT&T for another 2 years has me thinking otherwise :/

I'm having a similar problem. I used to have an iPhone 1st Gen and i've recently bought a 3GS. It was working fine until I found a fault with the signal chip and I exchanged it for a new iPhone 3GS.

Now, i've activated it and synced it with all the info backed up from my last sync, but every time I plug it into iTunes - It's asking me to Activate my new iPhone - You know, the screen everyone should see the first and only time they ever plug their iPhone into their computer.

If I click continue, it will got straight into my iTunes as if nothing's wrong and show how full my iPhone is and so on...

But this initial screen has appeared every time i've plugged my new iPhone in during the past few days. It's just a matter of clicking "continue" but this page should never have appeared again after I initially activated my iPhone.

Strange.

Hi folks. i just ran into this issue of itunes wanting to restore from backup the data to a seemingly well working iphone.

I got past this issue at the restore screen by selecting to restore from most recent backup, clicking continue and as soon as itunes started crunching to extract backup i physically disconnected my iphone.

After itunes finishes extracting backup it will exit that screen and remove iphone from devices list.

A prompt re-connecting of iphone and itunes recognized and sync normally. hope this works for you.

Trifster

Message was edited by: Trifster

Thank you so much. You have no idea how helpful that was.

Thanks Trifster, extremely unorthodox but successful solution, I am not sure why my 3GS had this problem, maybe taking it straight out of the dock without ejecting caused the issue, however it is never normally a problem.

Thanks from me also. Was just about to start a restore from an extremely old backup. Luckly i found this :P

I had the identical problem after upgrading my iPhone 3G to OS 3.0. This seems to have solved it though, thank you!

Well, when you think about it, let's see what brutali exactly stated so that we can confirm the issue...

"I updated my 3G to OS3.0 and it goes into recovery mode... iTunes always wants to Restore iPhone"...

This factor could confirm an issue with the OS 3.0 download, delete the file as it could be corrupted and also try connecting your iPhone on a new Windows/Mac User account with iTunes installed to see if it is User or System wide. If it is User-wide, then uninstall iTunes along with it's Apple components.