Hi All,
I have to provide an update because it is quite extraordinary. If you choose not to read the whole update, just remember the main point that even when it seems impossible, ALL HOPE IS NOT LOST!
Thats right! My iPhone seemed like it was completely dead and useless, sacrificed to the technology gods. But somehow, as if my magic, it is back online, functioning as if nothing ever happened, without a single app being out of place or a single file lost. Here's what happened since my original post:
With all efforts at home being useless, I decided to make the trek to the Apple store (during the holiday season nonetheless). The nice techinician unfortunately knew very little more than myself and ultimately his only suggestion was to buy a new phone and move on with my life. To be fair, he did try a few things to help. He checked the internals for any impact or water damage and found none. Then we tried to restore with the store computers, to no avail. He finally checked the battery and found that it wouldnt take a charge. This last piece at least allowed me to narrow down the problem to either the battery, the power management IC or the logic board.
Getting home, i looked into how to fix these three things and found that the PMIC issue requires unsoldering and resoldering pieces onto the logic board, the logic board fix requires basically disconnecting every internal component in the iphone while the battery fix was about 25% of the logic board work. I decided that the only one I was capable of handling myself was the battery - so i ordered a replacement battery off ebay and figured if that didnt work, then i'd either have to find someone capable of doing the deeper work, or suck it up and buy a new phone, even tho there are several complicating factors in acquiring a new phone.
But wouldn't you know it, before the battery even arrived, the phone is back up and running almost as if by magic. Since that trip to the store, I've basically just let my phone sit on a shelf without so much as even looking at it, as it just made me angry and upset. In the interim, I had another Apple issue in that the new Mavericks OSX corrupted my MBP hard drive and basically rendered my laptop useless. This laptop is basically my lifeblood so fixing it became my #1 priority. After trying to reinstall Mavericks, repair the disk, upload to the cloud and restore... nothing worked. I had to run out and pick up an external drive, transfer everything from my internal to the new external, wipe clean the internal, reinstall Mavericks, then transfer everything back to the internal. That took about 2 days of data transferring to finally produce (last night) a clean, fully functional computer.
Ok, so I had to literally reset every single little configuration and customization I had made while using my computer over the last 3 years, but hey, at least I still had all my data and was back on line. I suppose the positivity that stemmed from fixing my computer urged me to plug my phone back in one more time for the heck of it. A hint of optimism rose within me when I finally got a sign different than the ever present "connect to itunes" image. I finally saw the "low battery" symbol, which at least told me that the phone is able to read the battery and that the connection is solid. This was further encouraged as I unplugged from the wall to plug into the computer and the phone did not automatically shut off - a great sign!
I tried to restore again but was met with the message "current build not authorized" (or something like that). I did another quick search to find a fellow discussion board member post a link about the tool "TinyUmbrella". I downloaded that and it immediatley recognized my device. I clicked on "exit recovery" and literally within 2 minutes, my phone came out of DFU mode, restarted and magically came back to life. Entering in my pw and then my sim pin and I am back in business. The phone is working perfectly, holding a charge and ready to update to 7.0.4, even tho i'm a little nervous.
Long story short is that through all of my searching, I had not encountered a single other person who had the exact same problem as I was facing. There were plenty of similar problems that offered me consolation and reason to believe there is a bigger issue here that Apple is not publically addressing, but there was no real solutions for what was causing my problems. Nobody seemed to know what to do. And while I still cannot give a step by step guide to how to fix it, I can assert that even when everybody else tells you its dead, that you must move on and accept your fate, all might not be lost. Maybe all you need to do is let it sit for a few days, then plug it back in and try to fire it up again. Oh, and use tools like TinyUmbrella to solve problems when you can.
I'm very happy today, but to be honest, I was at a pretty low point over the last week. How could it be possible that my two main devices that I rely on and use every single day could mysteriously and suddenly both collapse within 1 week of each other? What the **** had I done to the technology gods to deserve this?!?!
I was in all honesty distraught. We come to rely on these devices for so many things and we forget what can happen when they dont behave as we expect. It has taught me a lesson that I hope I hold on to in the future that even things we trust and depend on every day can suddenly break down and leave us stranded. At least for tech purposes, its important to back things up and be prepared for such instances because there is nothing worse that the helplessness one feels when completely disconnected from the world he had for so long been attached to...
