recovery mode | Nitin Chandra's Blog

Can of Bugs!

Having just restored my iPhone 4s which had gone dead today after the iOS 8.3 update yesterday, I guess I have to take back my words from the previous post. I had mentioned that iOS 8.3 does not seem to be any worse than 8.2 and it should be okay to update. You might want to hold off the update since there are quite a few reports on the net which makes iOS 8.3 seem to be one of the buggiest releases ever.

My iPhone 4s went into a reboot & switch off loop while sending an email. The only way to fix it was to restore it using iTunes. A caveat here is that the phone had to be put in recovery mode for it to stop rebooting long enough for iTunes to recognise the device. For those who might have the same issue, just keep the home button on the phone pressed while plugging the USB cable into your system (Mac/PC). You might have to retry this a few times before the phone lands up in recovery mode and stops rebooting & switching off.

Do not attempt to update as that will generally fail. A full restore will work more often than not. I would also not recommend restoring from a backup, after recovery, since that might lead to the same loop all over again.

Think I should mention that iOS 8.3 also drains the battery on all my iPhones pretty fast and while updating with iOS 8.3, the phones heated up quite a bit.

I guess it’s time to carry around a back up phone if you use an iPhone and keep updating to the latest firmware from Apple…Just make sure it takes the same size SIM.

Watch out for the Apple watch…it might tell you the date & time of a different planet 🙂

Seems that Apple is yet to get partitioning and formatting right. One would think this used to be a DOS/Windows issue over a decade ago. Well, think again!

I partitioned and formatted my iMac HDD when Mountain Lion was released. I always like to do a clean install to make sure that there is nothing un-expected which can happen on occasion on a restore from a backup.

Everything worked fine and nothing seemed to be out of the ordinary for a while. By this time, I had filled up about 80% on the second partition with backups and downloads. Then, one day, I ran the latest update of Onyx, as I always do on any update of this wonderful free app, and to my surprise, it failed on the disk check.

The error was un-recoverable and the stock Disk Utility also had the same issue. Going through some forums, it seemed that quite a few people had encountered similar issues with no real solution listed.

I tried to re-boot the iMac in recovery mode to see if the disk could be repaired from there. Instead of booting into the recovery, as it used to, the iMac went to the internet to download something. For a moment I thought the HDD was gone as it failed to boot into the recovery. About 10 minutes later, it did go into the recovery mode and I was able to run the Disk Utility from there.

Finally, some hope…the Disk Utility corrected the partitioning issue with a message that suggested that the partition/data sizing was not done corrected and it had to resize the partition to fix the problem. So much for a tested release of an OS. I am just happy the issue was fixed and I did not have to go through a complete re-install which I had done with the Mountain Lion release.