my $600 brick
After hacking non-stop on my iPhone for a whole weekend, I was quite pleased to be an iPhone owner. Two days ago, however, something horrible happened… I somehow managed to brick my iPhone.
I was watching a youtube video on the BART, when I switched to Safari to check a web page when the unit froze solid. I held the home button for 8 seconds, which is the equivalent of force quitting whatever app is open, to no avail. I did my first hard reset by holding the power switch and home button together for ~10 seconds, which managed to turn the phone off, but it stalled at the metallic apple logo screen when I tried to start it again. I waited a good minute before I did another hard reset to turn it off. I put it away and waited until I got home before running my full line-up of diagnostics on it, including holding every button combo for 30 seconds.
Nothing worked. I could not get the phone past the apple logo screen.
I made an appointment with a “genius” at the SF Apple store, for which I arrived 10 minutes early. The genius tried a few things, including syncing the phone with my MBP and the MB they have in-store. He managed to pull up an error he’d seen before, so things were looking up. Then we got this little gem:
Oh, yeah, error 0xE8000025. Huh? I quickly googled it which turned up a few results for users syncing with non-standard characters in their usernames on windows. Clearly not for me.
We both tried for another 40 minutes or so everything in our book, including creating a new user, re-installing iTunes, and deleting a bunch of .kext and .plist files in the System Library. We never made it past that screen.
So, in good faith, Apple gave me a brand new replacement phone with no further questions asked, even though the guy was convinced it was a software error that could be fixed. How sweet of them.
I did notice this pop up when I synced just now:
Hrm. I sent it because I’m a good apple citizen. We’ll see what happens to this one.