When my brother attempted to update his first generation 16GB iPod Touch to iPhone OS 3.0, it decided to brick his iPod. He kept getting various spurious errors. The errors ranged from Error 4, to Error 2006 and almost anywhere in between. Most of these ‘claim’ they can be fixed by restarting the iPod, but this wasn’t the case for this iPod.
There is an article provided by Apple Update and restore error messages on iPhone and iPod touch. This article lays out the steps to try. The biggest one, which was coming down to last resorts for me, was to completely remove iTunes and re-install it.
This is not just removing the iTunes.app but also removing the 3 Plist files as well as the iTunesHelper from startup, rebooting your computer, and re-installing the whole thing again. I did this, along with doing a hard-restart of the iPhone. With this, iTunes was able to begin restoring the iPod Touch. But, it crashed half-way through. Simply restarting the iPod touch allowed it to start the process over again, this time successfully.
The biggest difference, in addition to completely re-installing iTunes and all associated files, is that I was using a different USB cable. This I CANNOT stress highly enough. If you encounter any errors with the USB device, try a different cable. Why does this make a difference? Because when I tried to charge the iPod Touch on my brother’s computer, it wouldn’t stay connected long enough and it would disconnect after 15 seconds of being connected. While using my USB cable, it worked without issues.
The total amount of time spent trying to fix this, along with successful restore was about 2 hours. That was just my portion. I did use my Macbook to fix this, since I didn’t care much about the iTunes installation since it’s not my main machine.
During the troubleshooting, I did look around the web and only found references to iPod Firmware 1.1.3 and jail breaking issues. However, these issues were not caused by either. So I had to take to investigating myself. If you’re having problems, keep trying, it should catch at some point, but if you’ve tried and it doesn’t work, call Apple, they’ll be able to determine what the issue is.
