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Nightly iOS 5 upgrade disabled my iPhone

I was too lazy to update yet to the release from the latest iOS 5 beta on my iPhone 3GS (I'm a developer). Although it was slow as molasses, I knew from the update on my iPad2 that it could take many hours. And it worked, so why update? And I expected to get an iPhone 4S when they were available in my little grotto of the world, so why update?


Well, now I know why you should update vigorously with your beta products, or they do it themselves.


I awoke last night because of a bright light. My iPhone had decided it could wait no longer and updated itself. Or so it seemed. When I looked closer in the morning I saw that it needed to re-activate itself. I went through the motions, but lo and behold: it could not connect to Apple's Activation Server. It was temporarily unavailable. I tried again and again over the last several hours (07:30 - 10:30), but the server remains unavailable. Meanwhile, my phone is unusable.


Thanks Apple, for updating my phone without warning, and render it disabled!


So, what to do?


Reset the thing and update from a downloaded iOS 5 .ipsw file? But that might wipe all my data, and I can't make a backup when it is in 'activation mode'. There might still be some pictures on the phone which I wanted to get off it.


I tried both my cable and adsl internet connections, because of Akamai checksum errors in the past, to no avail.


I will hold out a little longer, and then take the plunge of --trying to-- update from the ipsw image.



Axel Roest

Posted on Oct 21, 2011 1:40 AM

Reply
5 replies

Nov 17, 2011 1:39 AM in response to Axello

Hi,


I had a similar issue. Let me explain and also what has fixed my errors in the hope it will help others.


I have an iphone4 and previously when doing a major upgrade I've had to disable all security on my laptop to get it to even start to download the update, this has meant, my firewall, anti-virus, defender etc. I had to do the same again with the update to ios5 but this time on restore I was seeing exactly the screenshot shown above.


I tried various combinations of rebooting (laptop & iphone), disconnecting/reconnecting, different cables etc none of which were successful - I then left it overnight to see if that fixed it - NOPE.


Finally I did some checking on my network (my laptop is always connected over wireless) and something very weird was happenning that I never see - it was constantly verifying the network. I stopped the upgrade and the network went back to normal - restarted and had the same issue.


So I turned off the wireless - hard wired with an ethernet cable into my router and Hey Presto - worked straight away!


So the moral of the story in my case was use a hard wired network connection not wireless.


I hope this helps and saves someone alot of time and pain!


Regards


Padster

Nightly iOS 5 upgrade disabled my iPhone

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