My iPhone's frozen...and otherwise broken...
May 15, 2010 8:23 PM Subscribe
How do I unfreeze my iPhone? Difficulty: the power-down/sleep button doesn't work, so I can't do the manual reset by holding down the two buttons.
The power button on my iPhone hasn't worked for a while, and I need to get it fixed.
But tonight, I was listening to music on my phone, I get on to make a call, and suddenly my touch screen doesn't work. The phone still registers (e.g., if I plug it into my computer, it will download things.). Also, while at first the touch screen wouldn't even fade to black, it's doing that since I plugged it into my computer.
Still...no responsiveness from the touch screen.
So what can I do, if manual reset is currently not an option? Do I have to go into iTunes and restore to factory settings? Is that even likely to work?
Thanks.
The power button on my iPhone hasn't worked for a while, and I need to get it fixed.
But tonight, I was listening to music on my phone, I get on to make a call, and suddenly my touch screen doesn't work. The phone still registers (e.g., if I plug it into my computer, it will download things.). Also, while at first the touch screen wouldn't even fade to black, it's doing that since I plugged it into my computer.
Still...no responsiveness from the touch screen.
So what can I do, if manual reset is currently not an option? Do I have to go into iTunes and restore to factory settings? Is that even likely to work?
Thanks.
Best answer: If you can't do a manual reset, but the phone is recognized by your computer, your best option is indeed a full firmware restore via iTunes.
It only takes a few minutes to do this, and if you've sync'ed your phone to your computer at all in the past few weeks, you'll be able to restore your apps and data with one click as soon as the firmware reload finishes. If not, well, still not that big a deal, as you can also redownload your apps from the iTunes Store manually without paying for them a second time.
posted by killdevil at 9:04 PM on May 15, 2010 [1 favorite]
It only takes a few minutes to do this, and if you've sync'ed your phone to your computer at all in the past few weeks, you'll be able to restore your apps and data with one click as soon as the firmware reload finishes. If not, well, still not that big a deal, as you can also redownload your apps from the iTunes Store manually without paying for them a second time.
posted by killdevil at 9:04 PM on May 15, 2010 [1 favorite]
Is the power button physically broken? And are you 100% sure of that? My phone once got into a similar state where the power button didn't respond, but holding down both the home and power keys simultaneously for 60 seconds caused it to reset and fix itself. So you might give that a try. It takes a while, so give it a full minute holding them down to be sure.
If it's really physically broken then yeah you can restore firmware, but obviously it's not going to fix the physically broken aspect of it.. it'll definitely fix any software-related issues.
You can try draining the battery but in my experience what actually happens is it "sleeps" itself when you go into reserve power, similar to a macbook when you go into reserve power. So when it gets plugged back into a powersource, it just restores that state rather than rebooting clean. This may or may not fix your problem.
posted by cj_ at 11:42 PM on May 15, 2010
If it's really physically broken then yeah you can restore firmware, but obviously it's not going to fix the physically broken aspect of it.. it'll definitely fix any software-related issues.
You can try draining the battery but in my experience what actually happens is it "sleeps" itself when you go into reserve power, similar to a macbook when you go into reserve power. So when it gets plugged back into a powersource, it just restores that state rather than rebooting clean. This may or may not fix your problem.
posted by cj_ at 11:42 PM on May 15, 2010
BTW jailbreaking is great for this. I can SSH into my phone and run "reboot" :P
posted by cj_ at 11:44 PM on May 15, 2010 [1 favorite]
posted by cj_ at 11:44 PM on May 15, 2010 [1 favorite]
take the battery out for a few minutes, then reinstall and reboot. That should take care of the problem.
posted by julie_of_the_jungle at 2:50 PM on May 16, 2010 [1 favorite]
posted by julie_of_the_jungle at 2:50 PM on May 16, 2010 [1 favorite]
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posted by Artw at 8:36 PM on May 15, 2010