I kept getting a message saying 'error -34' when I tried to upgrade iPhone 3GS to iOS5. Now the whole thing has crashed and is unresponsive. My macbook can't find it in iTunes either. Won't switch off - just a twirling circle on the screen this morning. It was partially working after the upgrade yesterday. Any solutions?
Macbook, Mac OS X (10.5.7), iPhone
Make sure your Mac has all the recent software updates, then connect in recovery mode, shown here: iPhone and iPod touch: Unable to restore
If still not recognized try the suggestions here: iPhone, iPad, iPod touch: Device not recognized in iTunes for Mac OS X or here Mac OS X v10.6 or later: iOS device not recognized in iTunes after restart
Thanks for that, Ingo2711, I do seem to have got it going again now. In case it helps anyone else, what I did (by luck, rather than understanding) was this: Just let the battery run itself down, as the spinning circle stayed on all day. When it did run flat, I was able to plug it into the charger and immediately switch off by holding down the on/off button for a good 10 seconds (this wasn't working earlier on). I then recharged the phone and eventually it powered up with an active screen and a couple of texts tumbled in and beeped at me. Hurray. I have now set about restoring and syncing but made sure when I connected to my computer I cancelled the restore and sync processes until I'd found and checked the Option to Convert Higher bit rate songs to 128kbps AAC, which is on the Summary Page of the iPhone tabs when the phone is connected in iTunes. (The upgrade seems to automatically uncheck this box and then blows the memory by trying to fill the phone with high quality versions of the iTunes library.) So far, that all seems to be working.... I hope this iOS5 turns out to be worth it.
error -34, with upgrade to iOS5
