Problem
You are now getting this screen coming up on your iPhone when you try to turn it on and a hard reset (see here) hasn’t worked .
Cause
This is because the iPhone has gone into recovery mode (also called DFU Mode -which stands for Device Firmware Upgrade). This mode means that your iPhone can talk to iTunes without loading the iOS on your phone. So if there is an issue with the Operating system on your phone i.e. lost files, failed update or after trying to load a customised iOS onto your iPhone it can then be reloaded without using the missing/corrupted files on your iPhone.
Solution
If you have a MacBook Air or Mac running 10.5.6 you may find you cannot enter DFU mode.
If you phone is not already coming up with the symbol above you can try and get the iPhone into DFU mode yourself. This enables you to work round the current iOS installed on the iPhone and connect to iTunes and use the restore function, at no point will the screen come on.
- Plug the iPhone into the machine and then turn it off.
- Hold Home (front button) and power button (top right) together for 10 seconds.
- Release only the power button and keep holding the home button until the machine beeps or you see it come up as a USB device or if you have iTunes running you may see this message:
4. Once you have got the phone connected to the machine and recognised in iTunes you can either choose to reinstall the iOS completely or install from a backup on your Mac/iCloud, you shouldn’t loose much from your phone as long as you have been running the backups regularly. Once you have loaded version of the iOS onto the phone you should be able to use it normally, hoever if you find after restoring a backup the same symbol happens try:
- Installing the iPhone as if it were new as the fault may have been transferred to your backup as well.
- Try installing and older version of one of your backups if you have multiple backups available.
- Try restoring it to the oldest iOS you have and then see if symbol reappears.
- Try only installing one Apps back onto the phone at a time as one of these could be causing the fault.