iphone went into recovery mode after trying to update to 5.1

Assuming you have been preforming backups of the iPhone, you can restore from the backup. But you'll lose anything new since the last backup.

(The phone wasn't by any chance jail broken before, was it? That's a completely different issue.)

The exact same thing happened to me. So I restored it. Now my phone is stuck with the Apple on the screen with an empty progress bar. What do I do now?

i have just updated my iphone and was restarting every couple of minutes, read theat you need to back it up then restore it but it reboots before i have time to back it up ! now it wont turn on at all, just got the apple logo up ! tried holding both buttons, turns off then comes back to same spot !!!

dfu mode

How to enter iPhone DFU mode

• Connect the iPhone to your computer and launch iTunes
• Turn the iPhone off (hold down the power button at the top of the iPhone)
• Hold down the sleep/power button and home button together for exactly 10 seconds, then release the power button
• Continue to hold down the Home button until a message appears in iTunes telling you an iPhone in recover mode has been detected

• When you are in DFU mode your iPhone screen will be completely black

Even though the screen is black, that doesn’t mean the device can’t be interfaced with either iTunes or a custom firmware client (for jailbreaking, etc).

Remember that if you see the restore logo, iTunes logo, or any message on the iPhone screen, you are not in DFU mode but standard Recovery Mode. Again, DFU mode is signified by having a completely black screen on the device. If anything else is the case, repeat the steps above until you enter into DFU mode successfully.

Exit DFU mode on iPhone

The simplest way to exit out of DFU mode is to hold down the Home and sleep/power buttons on the iPhone while connected to iTunes. Then just hit the power button as and this should reboot the device as usual.

And if you’re curious, yes this works all the same on an iPod touch.

you already lose all info. so you have to restore

I had the same problem, got the iTunes update error before syncing and my phone got stuck on recovery mode. I was worried about losing my pictures since the last sync as I don't have them in iCloud because of space. I tried the pressing the home button thing and RecBoot, both with no luck, and also tried a number of applications to browse iPhone on PC which didn't work because none recognised it was connected. Finally I was able to access my data using iExplorer > Phone to PC. I got the same error message of application not recognising the iPhone but I could find all my recent data on Browse iTunes Backups > I think what happened is iTunes was actually able to do the back up my data before the iPhone went into recovery mode. I copied everything again just to be sure and now I can restore my iPhone with no worries. 🙂