ANY ONE KNOW WHAT IS ERROR 3 IN ITUNES WHEN I TRY TO RESTORE IPHONE 5 TO IOS 7 IT STUCKS IN THE END AND AFTER 30 MIN THIS COME OUT "UNKNOWN ERROR 3" CAN SOME ONE HELP ME PLZ

I wan't sure about this but you seemed to know a heck of a lot more than I do and really I had nothing to lose. IT FREAKING WORKED!! I have tried everything else I could think of/ find ... nada. Freezing this thing worked like a charm . You're brilliant . Thanks

Just singed up to this website to say Kenneth Young...what an absolute legend!!!!!!!!! Thank you SO MUCH for freezer trick. My Dads phone was out of warranty, tried to restore several times was froze at the end with Error 3.

Your freezer trick worked like a charm, i put the iphone 5s in a small plastic bag and put in freezer for about 20minutes, took it straight out and restored to latest ios 8.1.2.

Thank you so much Kenneth, apple were requesting about £199 for a replacement...which you have saved me from thank you!!!!!!

Hi Kennethyoung,

Thanks for the support to everyone.. I am facing a issue while restoring the ipad 3 with the "error 3". I saw your post there, but i could not understand. whether we need to wrap the ipad with paper towel and put it in ziplock with rice for 30 minutes. Am i right, Please correct me if i am wrong.

My uncle was trying to upgrade with 8.1 after upgrade it was not coming, when i tried to restore, i am getting "error 3 unknown error"

Please suggest me , No warranty for this ipad.

Hi,

not sure if Kenneth will answer, that's a long thread. The freezer trick is to cool the device, so that the temperature sensor doesn't generate an error while restoring the iOS firmware. The paper around the device is to protect it from humidity, water condensation.

As per myself, I managed to do the same 3 time already, by simply resting my iPhone on crushed ice. This has the benefit of not letting it warm up during the restore process. So in that case, you need to wrap the ice (not the RICE) into a plastic, and put paper tissues between your device and the ice.

hope this helps

-A

Hi again,

so it took a bit over two weeks then. Just today left the IPad into the charger for many hours my wife took it and started to watch something from youtube. And it started to do the repeatable reboot again in about 1 minute intervals (our son was not happy). And I notived it had activated the Mobile data even thought I do not have a Sim installed. I tried reset and remove all data. No help then full restore from ITunes, failed of course since IPad rebooted in the middle. Then the bric was ready again with error 3 when doing another try. Well... back to freezer while getting the boy to bed and after that plug in while in freezer and voila the restore worked. But this is just b*****it if that happens every three weeks.

Seems that same kind of problem is common iPad 2 keeps crashing rebooting after ios 8 update

But mine started before the update, but seems that after winning the error 3, the whole problem returns. And only way to correct is full restore that again brings up the error 3.

Wife is planning in getting her own pad, will not let her buy another Apple.

Hi kennethyoung

thank you very much for your time and support you have invested in this problem. One year ago I got network issues with my iPhone 5. I tried many times to solving that with switching flight mode off and on, but it didn't work and unfortunately my device was already out of guarantee. After that i tried to update my phone when suddenly Error 3 occurred. I searched in the Internet and found this forum. I tried the freezer, but by the first time it didn't work. Then I tried it again - and it worked!

I'm very happy and I hope you all will find a solution for this problem, because its very frustrating and I'm a bit disappointed in apple for their bad support.

Thank you all very much and a special thanks to kennethyoung!

Sorry for my bad english (-;

Hi everybody again,

so it worked for about two weeks again and the same thing happens starts to search for mobile network suddenly without SIM installed. And then enters the constant reboot loop. Such a nice feature 😟

So I tried to restore again, this time there is a a new version of iTunes 12.1.0.71 and iOS 8.1.3. (had some hope that this issue would be repaired).

So installed the new iTunes and it downloaded latest iOS. Well they fixed something allright. Now it is unknown error -1 at the same point of the restore (late in firmaware) as it earlier was error 3. I even tried the freezer once but same result. Be I will give that anothet try. But now it seems even worse.

Any idea how to get this done, or have anyone else had this same issue?

I feel reassured... My iPhone goes into reboot once a week, for no reasons... luckily, it still works after that.

"You are not alone."

Yes I am sure I am not alone. Once a week would be just fine, but a minute is a loop that you cannot use the device at all.

I now tried the restore many times even the freezer twice. But no go just the error -1.

Maybe I take it to the store to see what happens since it is just over 2 year old.

Thank you kennethyoung!

I have an iPhone5 running on the latest iOS firmware(8.1.3). I had this carrier searching problem yesterday almost the entire day so i decided to do a restore. The thing is that i've had done a restore on a previous iTunes version which gave the error(3) and after updating iTunes it gave error(-1). Anyways, i've had this problem with my carrier dropping reception to searching and repeats itself. Occasionally i would have to re-enter my activation details. So this morning i left my iPhone in the freezer at 11am and left it in while doing the restore at 12:10pm. The restore was successful! I can't thank you enough Kenneth!

My only doubt now is whether i should restore from a backup which will put the phone into a restore mode again. i'm worried the same problem would arise. I'll post the error log later. Would be great if someone had done a successful restore from the freezer trick and restored from a backup to advice? Thanks! Apple should have acknowledge this thread. Now i'll have to think twice getting any apple product.

Thanks so much guys, specially kennethyoung.

Had the "permanent searching" thing on my 5s (German O2) for 2 days, not responding to taking out the sim at all.

Previously it happened 2 times, once I did a simple restore, once I did the update to 8.1.3 to solve the problem.

This time I have been with it at the Genius Bar and they told me, they had no solution but to replace my phone (out of warranty, 2xx €).

Though they were not sure if it could be a problem with an app.

So they told me to try a restore from DFU mode first.

That brought my phone into a state I could not recover from. I tried maybe 30 installs with different firmwares, different computers, Win and Mac, always ending with "error -1" during "installing firmware".

By then I was completely sure my phone was done for and I was considering taking a replacement or upgrading, when I happend to come across this thread.

I put it into a plastic bag, put it into the freezer at -18°C for an hour and after that did the complete restore while it lay in there.

It worked without a single hicup and has been fine since then.

I´m really grateful, guys!

So far, has anyone been able to find out, where that annoying "searching" bug comes from?

Hello, the freezer trick has worked for me but after a week, the searching issue was still persistent. So finally today i did another restore since the searching for carrier prevented me from activating my phone. Thinking that the "searching..." issue would resolve after a restore so that i could activate my phone but of course it did not happen! now i'm stuck with a bricked phone still "searching..." for carrier at the activation screen. All i could see now is "Hello" in 24 thousand languages. As far as it goes till "sorry the activation server is currently unavailable" or something like that due to the "searching..." bug. i'm on ios8.1.3 and it did not solve my carrier searching problem):

Hi kennethyoung,

Thanks so much for this advice! I sincerely appreciate your help with this. I can confirm that the freezing trick worked for my iphone 4 which had "error 2", and not "error 3" as most people here seem to have suffered. My problem was that I decided to upgrade the from iOS 6.1.3 to iOS 7.1.2 which failed part way through (about 75% from the end). I couldn't put iOS 6.1.3 back because Apple don't sign it any more and no matter what way I tried to put iOS 7.1.2 on, it would fail. Just for everyone's information, my logs showed this error when trying to update the baseband:

Exception at :0:

- kBBUReturnError(1)/2: Response type is 0x41 but expected 0x804

bbupdater:

bbupdater: !!! bbupdater: Exception at :0:

- kBBUReturnError(1)/2: Response type is 0x41 but expected 0x804

send_bbupdate_status: sending baseband update status to host

update_baseband: bbupdater error: Exception at :0:

- kBBUReturnError(1)/2: Response type is 0x41 but expected 0x804

0: RamrodErrorDomain/3ec: update_baseband: failed to perform next stage

1: BBUpdater/2

unable to convert ramrod error 1004

Note: this is an output from idevicerestore (a program for installing ipsw files onto iphones from ubuntu rather than windows/mac osx).

So anyone exhibiting these symptoms - check your logs for a similar output (and lots of failed pings) and try the freezer trick. I placed the phone in a ziplock back along with some silica gel packs for 45 minutes. The restore worked first time! I did the eventually restore with itunes running on a macbook as it is a faster computer than my ubuntu machine and I wanted to be sure the restore was completed before the phone warmed up!

Thanks once again kennethyoung!

sorry, i know the post is kind old, but i have to reply this, and say thank you.

oh my fxxxxxxx dear lord!!

kennethyoung

it worked, the frozen thing worked on my iPhone5. I really tried everything, I even opened my iphone up, unplug the battery, preheat the baseband chip...none of those worked.

but then I tried to freeze my iphone5 today, and it worked like a charm!

I am so excited!

really!

I have been struggling with this terrible error3 for a month!

thank you

it is not a software issue, it is because something called baseband chip is failed to function properly.