iPhone - Stuck "Preparing to sync" when trying to sync with iTunes via USB cable

For those using Mac, you don't need to fiddle with Terminal or have administrative rights. Even simpler work-around: just use Activity Monitor to Force-Quit the MDCrashReportTool process, as in thread 255344479.

PS: shutting down my Apple Watch indeed did not help, this seems unrelated as far as I can see on my end.

Struggled with this for a long time. MBP M1 Max and iPhone 15proMax.

Both on latest OS release (no betas).

shutting down the “MDCrashReportTool.exe” with Activity Monitor allows everything to immediately sync. It was closest thing to file mentioned on Windows machine so I gave it a shot and bam instant sync just the way they used to be.

thanks.

I raised a support ticket with Apple yesterday. Chat couldn't help so they passed me to a senior engineer by phone who has no passed this on to someone else (everyone very helpful, btw, even thought they couldn't solve the problem). They wanted a video of the problem and the solution (killing the crash process) which I've sent so hopefully they will resolve and I'll update when I hear back

Apple Support have now responded after going back and forth a few times. They are aware aware of this being a broader issue and a fix is currently being worked on that will be released as part of some future update to iTunes, iOS or WatchOS or all three. No schedule for that, of course, but at least we know it's on the radar.

So, stick with killing the MDCrashReport process for now.

Confirm this works. As soon as I stopped it in task manager it moved on.

Thank you, Minok

Can confirm this helped -- on macOS Sonoma 14.1.1 w/ iOS 17.1.1 on iPhone 11, mid November 2023.

I've encountered similar before, many years ago using iTunes on Windows. More recently in the last few years on a MacBook Pro w/ iPhone 7 or 8, and the current iPhone 11, and now my current MacMini M2 w/ the iPhone 11.

Agree -- This is a long-term, ongoing issue that needs to be fixed.

Thank you for the helpful observation on the root cause.

---

After rebooting my phone, and computer, problems not resolved ...

On macOS, I did the following in terminal (while sync was hung in Finder) ...

sudo launchctl list | grep Crash

... found the equivalent entry, com.apple.CrashReporterHelper (running w/ a PID), and then issued ...

sudo kill -9 <pid>

... a few seconds later, the sync operation completed. I re-ran sync, and it completed quickly without issue.

To you and others calling out the Apple Watch as a contributing factor, be advised not everyone has an Apple Watch connected and sync still raises the "stuck issue". When I disconnected my Apple Watch (deleted the connection from my iPhone), the issue did not resolve. It's a clue but not necessarily the reason for the getting stuck. Just sayin'.

Wow. Yup, this did it.

I'm glad I continued clicking on google search results and didn't give up before finding this.

Too bad this isn't the first search result that comes up. Would save people a lot of time.

Once I ended the process, BOOM! it continued with the sync, and now all my songs are on my phone!

I did a very similar thing on macOS 17.2 (RC), except it didn't show up under launchctl, I found it via:

ps aux|grep Crash

and I got the process:

/<long path>/MDCCrashReportTool

So I issued:

sudo kill -9 <pid>

-9 was required, regular kill did not have enough oomph. Immediate sync after issuing kill. Good lord this has happened on and off for YEARS for me (and every time for the last many months; if I sync again after it's synced once it was always fast, but the first one after plugging in was always sloooooooow), thank you for the tip!

you are the best! i spent the whole day trying to figure out why it‘s not working. first iTunes somehow pushed iCould to download 400GB of data over night. even if it was set to use iCloud for sync and not local. it filled the harddisk to 0Byte of free space. i could not even uninstall iTunes anymore because there was no space. then i searchd for the data. I found a 75GB folder which was 1.5 years old, ThunderItunesExtractor or so. Then i deleted iCloud and the 400GB fotos it downloaded. multiple re-installations and so on. even on another PC it did not work. apple support could not help me. then i found your post. killed the task (sub-task of iTunes in Windows 11) and it immediately started syncing. it‘s a shame what Apple delivers regarding iCloud and iTunes for windows. very bad user experience.

ended up getting some help locating the desktop version of itunes 64bit, installed it(after first uninstalling the app version, mind), then followed the procedure above, which has successfully addressed the problem.

Found the file but Windows/Apple wont allow it to be deleted or renamed.

Killing the process when iTunes is trying to sync does work but it's so annoying to do this every time I want to sync new music to my phone. This has only started happening in my case since 17.2, although "preparing to Sync" started to take an age since 17.0 was launched.

I created a batch file to automate this process (slightly).

In a new notepad file, type:

@echo off

taskkill /f /im MDCrashReportTool.exe

Exit

Save this file as a .bat instead of .txt, then double click it after you've started your iPhone sync/backup. I haven't yet put any effort into working out how to delete or rename the file, but I suspect a safe mode boot might work. Will update once I test it.

Found a logfile here:

C:\users\<USERNAME>\AppData\Local\Packages\AppleInc.iTunes_nzyj5cx40ttqa\LocalCache\Roaming\Apple Computer\Logs\DeviceLink\MDCrashReportTool.exe.00.log

This may give some clues as to why the process is hanging, however my issue seems to have resolved itself overnight.

The error logs from yesterday when it stopped working are as follows, hopefully they can help in finding a solution:

2023-12-13 12:26:18.817|MDCrashReportTool.exe|10788:94461040|MDCrashReportTool.m:_cancelCopySubmitCrashReports| ERROR: No crash report copier running for target 00008110-001A18901E7A801E

2023-12-13 12:26:18.859|MDCrashReportTool.exe|10788:23666616|CrashReportCopierAFC.m:_I_CrashReportCopierAFC_waitUntilCrashReportMoverFinished_| ERROR: SSL_read returned error 0: 5

2023-12-13 12:26:18.924|MDCrashReportTool.exe|10788:23666616|CrashReportCopierAFC.m:_I_CrashReportCopierAFC_connectToCrashReportCopyTarget| ERROR: AMDeviceStartService for mobile

2023-12-13 12:26:22.356|MDCrashReportTool.exe|10788:23666616|CrashReportCopierPrivate.m:_I_CrashReportCopierPrivate_device| ERROR: Could not find a device with UID 00008110-001A18901E7A801E

2023-12-13 12:26:22.356|MDCrashReportTool.exe|10788:23666616|CrashReportCopierDL.m:_I_CrashReportCopierDL_connectToCrashReportCopyTarget| ERROR: Error -402653177 connecting to device: (null)

MDCrashreport.exe appears under the iTunes process when iTunes is running which is where you can kill it if you don't use the great .bat file that someone kindly posted here. I'm just keeping that bat file on my desktop until Apple sort this out.

On that note, Apple support have been back to me three times already asking for bits of info and diagnostics so they do seem to be taking this seriously, although no solution yet and it’s been about a week since I first got in touch with them.