Macenstein

CLAP! CLAP!

Yes, that’s right, I bought me a new 3G iPhone this Saturday, even after all my whining about how I was going to wait for a 32GB model to be released before updating my 1st gen. And honestly, I would have waited, if not for a series of somewhat odd circumstances which occurred over vacation last week involving an emergency room. (If you care to hear about them, I’ll throw them at the end of this article, as it is not really what the article is about).

Above: Hmmm… What does my iPhone think is taking up all that space?

My first 3G crash, 4 Days in

So, you know those reports of the 3G iPhones not launching 3rd party apps and user data disappearing? Well, I had assumed I lucked out, as I had updated the iPhone’s software with 2.0.2 Saturday night (right after buying it) and had been using it trouble free until yesterday. That’s when my boss finally succumbed to my iPhone proselytizing and ran out yesterday afternoon and bought himself one. As we were about to leave for the day, I decided to give him a couple pointers on how to get out of any “buggy” behavior he might experience, knowing full well he’d come to me if anything went wrong. I showed him that holding down the “Home” button for 5-7 seconds would quit an app. That went fine. I then told him “Well, this new software so far has been pretty stable, but just in case you should need to reboot your iPhone, you just hold down the “Sleep” and “Home” buttons for about 10 seconds, and it will reboot the iPhone. I did it, showed him the Apple reboot screen, and then the iPhone booted up normally. So far so good.

So, having taught the man to fish, I head out to my car, hook the iPhone to my AUX jack to listen to some tunes on the drive home, only to be told told my iPhone no longer thinks it has any songs on it. Hmmm… I check “Videos”, as I know there are about 4GB of videos on it… Nope. It says I have no files.

I check the info screen for the iPhone and see that, yes, it really does think I have no media on the iPhone anymore, although it DOES admit I have about 11 GB of SOMETHING on it, it just isn’t sure what.

“OK,” I think, “well, I can make it home on Pandora or AOL radio”. Nope, both apps crash on launch. In fact, ALL my apps crash on launch, except for the standard Apple ones like Mail, Safari, etc. (Oddly, “Remote” also crashed, I guess only old school Apple apps are tough enough). So, I drive home in angry silence, knowing all too well from my previous 10 failed restores on my first iPhone that I am in for a long night.

S-U-C-C-E-S-S, that’s the way we spell Success!

I eventually got my iPhone back up and running, but it took 5 hours, so it would likely have been quicker to just restore the iPhone as a new device and reload everything (although I would have lost my awesome level 19 placement on Critter Crunch). But, on the odd chance this should happen to you or your friend, I will take you through my steps so you can see what I did, and hopefully it will help someone.

I had successfully let my 3G iPhone back itself up during one of my syncs about 2 days after I bought it, but despite my hopes of faster sync times, those backups take the same 2 hours as they did on my 1st gen iPhone. Since that sync was on Monday night, and it was now Wednesday night, I figured if possible, it would be better to try to find a way to keep my current data. When I plugged my iPhone into iTunes, the summary screen showed me that iTunes at least still knew I had about 11GB of media, so I tried just syncing (canceling out of the backup) and figured maybe that would jar my iPhone’s memory as to where all my media was. It successfully moved over some new files I added, so I ejected the iPhone only to find it had made no difference – the iPhone still thought it was empty, and aps did not launch. So I bit the bullet, and allowed it to do a full backup.

That back up took 2 hours, as it always does. But when completed, I decided to do a clean restore of the iPhone, and then restore from that backup image. I figured that since iTunes saw I still had all my media, there was a 50-50 chance that the backup would be a good one, and the “missing” files on the iPhone were do to the iPhone’s software not being able to find them. The iPhone software restore took about 40 minutes, and then I was asked if I wanted to restore my data from the backup I had just made. I said yes, and then waited.

I’m not sure how long the restore really should have taken, as after about an hour the progress bar seemed to hang at about 95% complete. I walked away and let it chug along, positioning my mouse pointer so I could see if any progress was made. I came back an hour later, and found, no, it was still stuck there, the restore seemed to have frozen at 95%.

Above: If all else fails, trying pulling a Process Sample to unfreeze iTunes.

Not really knowing what to do, I fired up Activity Monitor and checked out what iTunes was doing. It did not seem to be doing much of anything, so I decided to hit the “Sample Process” button. I knew I was not tech savvy enough to know what the hell the Sample Process was going to tell me, but I figured maybe it would either show me a bunch of text (meaning it was doing something), or be blank, and I might know if the app had truly hung.

Well, perhaps it was a coincidence, but the second I hit the Sample Process button, the progress bar disappeared, and my iPhone booted back to the Apple logo screen and then fired up. All my files were there, the apps all launched, they remembered my passwords and scores. The only problem was that the icons were all out of order, but I could live with that (although with 6 screens of apps, rearranging them all actually adds a good 20 minutes to the process).

So, that’s my story, and my advice to anyone experiencing this funky behavior depends on what type of data you will lose by not restoring your iPhone from a backup. Honestly, I could have reset the iPhone as a new phone and played Critter Crunch for an hour and gotten back my score, and maybe spent another hour re-entering all my info and settings into my apps like MySpace and Pandora and such and have been better off. But if you have a big commitment in hours of gameplay and highscores, I would recommend letting your iPhone back up overnight maybe every other night. Also, if your restores seem to hang, try running a “Sample Process” in the Activity Monitor on iTunes, see if that scares it back into action.

And actually, my main piece of advice is don’t force your iPhone to reboot just to demo for your boss if there isn’t a problem, as it apparently can cause one.

Now, as for that emergency room story…

We were on vacation last week with my brother’s family (sorry for not posting as frequently) and my wife’s RAZR began dying. Now, as luck would have it (good for me, bad for her) on the last day at the shore, my 6-year old got hit in the face with a metal golf club by her rather “over zealous” cousin while playing mini golf, breaking her nose and causing probably the most amount of blood I have ever seen in my life (with the exception of some zombie movies) to puddle in a pool by her feet on the 8th hole.

So, how could this possibly be good news for me? Well, we happened to be playing “Pirate” golf at on the lovely Point Pleasant NJ, boardwalk, and my 4-year old son was scared of the pirate skeleton statues and wanted to play mini golf on the wussier rooftop golf above the arcade. So my wife and I decided to split up, they went to wuss golf, we went to the Pirate golf.

Once my daughter got whacked, I rushed her to first aid with many a startled onlooker who must have assumed she’d been shot (my God, there really was a lot of blood for such a small girl!). For the next half hour I tried to get a hold of her mother on the phone, but since her RAZR had been going in and out all week, it was pretty much dead. She eventually got a text message from me and we hooked up, but she was so pissed at her phone that she agreed I should get a new iPhone when we got home, and she would take my old one.

Incidentally, my daughter is doing fine now, thanks for asking, and she loves that there are now 2 iPhones to play with in the family so she doesn’t have to fight with her brother.

The funniest thing about this whole experience (and I am one of those annoying people that finds every horrible situation to be funny) is that when my son saw his bloody sister waiting in the First Aid station, he said “I knew one of those pirates would come to life and attack us!”