Stuck at "Connect to iTunes" (error 4005)

Thanks NikSmith - 4 hours of dealing with this. This solved my problems, thanks!

I was updating my wife's 4s, and ran into the same problem. Google search brought me here. I tried some of the suggestions, and they unfortunately didn't work for me. What did work was leaving it alone for about 8 hours. I woke up, and after re-installing itunes for a second time, it recognized the phone, and I was able to restore it to factory settings, update it, and recover all data.

I experienced this problem today trying to do an iTunes 7.0.0 > 7.0.1 on a 5S. I was unaware of the key sequence mentioned elsewhere here for 'recovery mode', I"m a newb on Apple. But apparently I was able to get into that mode. I did a clean reboot on my host (win7-64). I plugged the iPhone into the USB on the host. I could see that the phone was recognized and the proper driver loaded. I then started iTunes. iTunes sat there dumb and clueless for about 2-3 minutes and finally announced that it had detected an iPhone in recovery mode. It offered to restore it and, in the process, load the current OS (7.0.1). After 5 minutes and a couple phone restarts, the phone was back.

Prior to the iTunes recovery, the symptom was that upon poweron or hard reset recovery, the iTunes connect graphic would immediately appear on the screen.

I"m sorry I can't be more specific about the EXACT details, but I'm posting to say that at least in some instances a recovery is possible. If anything sticks out to me, it's that it took 2-3 minutes for iTunes to decide there was a device out there; I'm fairly impatient and would be inclined to throw hands in air before that point and declare the situation lost.

FOR 4S peeps: This happened to me, however by good fortune, itunes crashed and restarted after the update to itunes. My phone displayed the connect to itunes screen. once itunes restarted, ity recognised my iphone as being in recovery mode. At this point, recover your phone. it will factory reset. Then use the backup you hopefully made to restore your content. With luck you do the setup, and your iphone has the new ios 7 and you have your content. Hope this helps someone at least.

I have an iPhone 5 and had this same error where iTunes would become stuck and eventually error out with the 4005 code. As an addition to this discussion I've just been in touch with Apple support, and neither the adviser nor his supervisor had ever seen this code before. I've been advised that it is possible it was an underlying hardware fault exposed by the iOS 7 update and I now have an appointment to replace the phone.

Shame that it has voided the 20 hours of my time I spent trying to troubleshoot this. I wish Apple would engage on these forums to address what are clearly some widespread common faults. It would save a lot of hassle from people running round in circles on here.

I, too, am having this problem. The update worked fine on my iPhone 5 on a Windows 7 machine. The update failed on my wife's phone on my Windows XP machine.

The problem may be Win XP or the fact that it's my wife's phone. I would believe either. My devices always update fine, and any update to my wife's devices always end up with a data wipe and restore. Regardless of the real cause, I think everyone knows who gets the blame!

All kidding aside, this is miserable. The iOS7 update bricked my wife's phone. *&!@.

I also had this error. Here's how I fixed it:

1. Hard reset of phone (hold power button and main button for ~10secs)

2. Uninstall iTunes and restart computer,

3. Reinstall iTunes (all while the iPhone is disconnected.)

4. After loading the freshly installed iTunes, connect the iPhone, wait ~3 minutes and a message will pop up saying that the phone was in recovery mode and needed to be restored. Click "OK" or "yes", I forget what, but just confirm that it's ok to proceed.

5. Say goodbye to all your previous data and hello to your updated system.

Hope this works for everyone else!

Just an update - none of the data was lost following an iTunes restore. Hooray!

UPDATE: I restored the bricked iPhone on my Windows 7 machine (to factory default), then connected to WinXP and it was detected. Then I restored from backup on the winxp machine and all data was still there (photos) and settings restored correctly. Just had to wait for all apps to reinstall from the computer but this worked. Terrible experience and plenty of stress wondering if my wife's photos would still be there.

BACK UP before you trust Apple with your data!

Hi, i haave the same problem. updated to ios 7 then phone went in to recovery mode and is stuck on connect to itunes. connected to itunes (11.0.4) restored to 6.1.4 (i guess itunes cant update to ios 7 yet) but to no avail. it says theres some error or something during software update. so i did it again and same thing happened. did it 3 times and still nothing.. this is ppretty much wasting my weekend haha using 4s and macbook

Please help me someone... I don't want to restore my phone to factory settings as I've not done a backup for ages (and I'm up to level 187 on Candy Crush!). 😢 Is there any way to fix this problem without restoring the phone? I use Windows7 and iPhone 4s. I also have Windows8 I could use.

Here's another update on the 4005 issue. I had to REPEAT this experience today (22 sep) because of a password lockout situation (!!).

Basically I had to a recovery on the device. Using the same machine that managed to recover it in my first post, this time I repeated the recovery attempt three times and all three times encountered the 4005 failure after a 5 minutes timeout 'waiting for device'.

The interesting bit: I had another machine handy - a Dell with 32 bit win7. I loaded current iTunes and repeated the same exact attempt to recover. Worked the first time! The dell had USB2 ports. The machine that failed had both USB2/USB3 but failed on both of them.

Not enough info to say anything intelligent on why one worked, the other didn't, but you may want to try a DIFFERENT computer. For reasons unknown, it may do the trick.

Thank you very much hollywood1969. Your comment saved my neck. I was about to loose my mind when I was upgrading to ios7 from ios 6.1.3. My iphone got stuck into an endless restore mode. The reason was that I am using an extension cable to increase the length of my usb cable. That was the only mistake. It sounds rediculous. But that was the truth. You have to connect the iphone usb cable directly to the computer cpu to succeed in doing the upgrade.

This has been a total nightmare. Ended up making an appointment. When I got there, they did a hard restore and was given directions as to what to do next. Went home and as I attempted to follow the directions from the tech at the Apple store, it happened again. Phone got stuck - itunes logo and usb cable showing on screen. Back to the Apple store. This time, when they restored it restored to 6.1. They could not believe it. I told them to leave it. Back home (now it's 5:30 pm) and when I connected to Itunes, it recognized my phone and I ended syncing each section individually.

Phone backed up what was on ICloud and it's working like there was no problem.

Don't know what the issue was if it was OS 7 or my computer. OS 7 downloaded (automatically) to my iphone (4S) but I have not installed it and I'm not sure I will. Maybe when I get the 5S and I sell this one, I will.

I'm getting an Imac at the same time, so I can't imagine having these issues again but then you never know.

Thanks to all who posted here and offered their help.

I also had the same Problem with first error 3194 then with error 4005 - when trying to restore an iPad to factory defaults.

in order i tried the following steps:

1. restore on old itunes to 6.1.3 on notebook w W7 x64 -> error 3194 every time

2. restore on actual itunes to ios7 on PC w W7 x64 -> error 3194 every time

3. checked %windows%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts to be clear (no gs.apple.com entry) - like found on google

4. deleted contents of folders of %appdata%\apple...\itunes - like found on google

5. resulting in error 4005 on PC with W7 x64

6 and final - installing new itunes on Client with W7 x86 -> restored successfully on first try to ios7

i think its possibly an issue with the x64 itunes restoring process, but perhaps deinstalling itunes w clearing above folders and reinstalling also helps when it happens on 32bit installations ...?

good luck everybody and sorry for bad english 😉