iPhone 15 Plus stuck in “Preparing To Sync"

Thanks for the update and for sharing your report to AS.. I'm no expert with any of this so I'm glad they're working on it because I'm having the same issue (MacBook Pro - OS Monterey 12.7.2 & iPhone 13Pro iOS 17.2.1). Like other's have said, my Sync stalls at step 2 so I've found that detaching and reattaching the USB cable seems to work but I'm not confident as all my music still doesn't seem to sync. As for force quitting MDCrashReportTool, can't do it because it's nowhere to be found. I've found and opened the Activity Monitor and done a search for the MDCrashReportTool and nothing. It appears to be non existent. I'm also getting a message on several songs from a CD that I ripped on my MacBook, with the intention to add to my phone, that reads “This Song is not Currently Available in your Country or Region”. I've read elsewhere that this message appears because it's older music (90's ish), and the rights to these songs was dropped on Apple Music a short while ago but the thing is, I haven't downloaded these songs, these are songs from a physical CD I ripped and tried to upload to my phone !! They play just fine on my MacBook but won't even show up on my phone. I thought I'd be "smart guy" and try creating a playlist with only these songs and they did appear in the playlist, but they're grey'd out and that's when I click on them, I get the above mentioned message. Pretty frustrating when I can't even listen to music I bought and paid for 30+ years ago !

I have two MBP: 2021 16 inches with 14.2.1 (23C71) and 2023 14 inches with 14.2 (23C64) which is a work issued Mac. My personal (14.2.1) started behaving as everyone are reporting below.

I just tried my work Mac (14.2) and it syncs and backup normally. Needless to say, I won't upgrade the OS on my work Mac until this is resolved.

I did unplug the phone and looks like my owned music did transfer this time. This is a new phone and I have never had this happen before. Apple kept saying I needed to buy software to transfer my own owned/physical music. Ridiculous. My problem is fixed for today.

Ugh. I had to click off tasks until I found the right combination that allowed my computer to start syncing properly.

iPhone 15 Pro - ios 17.2.1

Windows 11 Education

64 bit operating system

The MDCrashReoortTool wasn't enough for mine. I had to click off

MobileBackup (32bit) FIRST to get past Step2, then

MDCrashReportTool second.

My songs finally starting downloading onto my iphone, after 6 hours of trial and error with various cords, restarting the programs, reinstalling, updating, youtube and webpage searching and applying what I found. Hopefully I can save someone else the hours of torturous searching and trying combinations and process killing...

But yeah, if you're finding that the MDCrash doesn't work first off, then open up your task manager and start killing processes to see which ones will allow your device to sync properly. Come on apple, we pay thousands of dollars for our devices not to work properly...

I had to end the MDCrashReportTool using Windows Task Manager each time when syncing my iPhone 11 Pro using iTunes on my Windows 10 PC. After instaling iOS 17.3, all is well. The crash tool still runs but no longer causes the sync operation to hang in Step 2. All Hail iOS 17.3!

Update; switched to wi-fi sync and that worked. Not sure why this works and the cable sync gets hung up, but it did work.

Mark

Thanks for the info! I didn't have the issue with my iPad but it hung with my iPhone 15 Pro. Killed the process in Task Manager and the sync took off. Would have been sitting there for a long time!

It's there. Click on any process name in the list. Type "mdc" it will go right to it. Be sure not to Quit, but to FORCE Quit.

ooppsss wrote:

I meant Crash Monitor -

I think you mean MDCrashReportTool

When the sync stalls …. Find it in Activity Monitor and Force Quit

and apparently you have to force quit it or close it every time you sync. Fun!

Is everyone aware this issue has been reported as far back as 15 years ago, release after release?

Do a one word search for MDCrashReportTool and you will see what I mean.

For example: Can't sync music - Apple Community

The absolute craziest bs thing is that MDCrash wasn't running in my Activity monitor when I started the process. Probably turned off from the last time I did this and synced my phone yesterday. Everything ran smoothly... the backup and whatnot. Then when the process got to "Preparing to sync" that's when MDCrashReport activated in the activity monitor. I watched it happen. It wasn't there, then when the "preparing to sync" started... boom, there it was. Why is this a process that's only being started when syncing and it's the cause of the hangup? My goodness they need to figure this bs out already. It's only been years 🙄.

Northern-Survivor wrote:

I would have thought the tool is only invoked or launched in response to an error - its purpose is to send crash reports to Apple. So something returns a non zero code immediately the “Preparing to Sync” step starts, which launches the tool which hangs.

I'm a programmer, albeit not for macOS, but I avoided suggesting exactly this because there are other possibilities and it's impossible to say without knowing the details of what the process is and does. It might be launched in response to finding an error report on the phone, or in response to some error during the sync process, as you suggest.

But it's also entirely possible that it gets launched every time the sync runs and its job is to poll the phone for error logs and report them if it finds any. Or it could launch at the start of sync and sit open until the end to monitor for errors during the activity.

All we can really say is that it gets launched at the beginning, and the sync refuses to proceed while it's stuck doing whatever it is it does.

Apple must know about this issue and it’s disconcerting that they don’t seem able to solve the problem(s).

I mean, iOS 17.2 has been out for all of 6 days, so it's not exactly unusual or shocking that Apple hasn't released a patch for it yet, even if they found out about it on day 1--that kind of thing takes at least some time and regression testing before you push an update to tens (if not hundreds) of millions of devices. And while this bug is very annoying for people who do a wired sync of their phones (if it does indeed affect all of them, which it may not--there may be some additional necessary trigger), that's a pretty uncommon thing these days, so it's impacting a relatively small fraction of the user base.

fantaisie-impromptu wrote:

Update: It appears that it may have to do with the Apple Watch. I turned off my wifi, bluetooth, and cellular (Not Airplane Mode) and it synced fine. (I do skip the backup) It took about 10-15 seconds and all of the steps completed.

Second Update: Never mind. This seems to be very very unpredictable.

I tested this, and turning off any or all network connections on the phone made no difference, so it was a red-herring. I also don't have it set to backup to the Mac right now so that wasn't it either.

That said, if you were able to get it to not trigger the hang, then that does mean it's not happening 100% of the time, or not to 100% of users, which points to it being a narrower bug than "all wired sync is broken" and more "some combination of factors triggers a bug on wired sync".

Thanks for this help!! It also worked with my iPhone XS and Windows PC. In the Task Manager, I was not able to find MDCrashReportTool immediately. It was hidden under the itunes.exe app. Now the sync works as expected, but a shame one has to end this task evertime I sync my iPhone...