This post is about my personal experience with my phone. Having researched a lot of materials on the internet, both on apple site and other tech sites, I have found that my case was not treated. As easy as it was to resolve after a long period of looking for a solution, apple hasnt found it necessary to include it as one of the necessities when trying to update your iPhone iOS.
I got an iPone 5s some months ago and was feeling cool with it. I downloaded lots of music from iTunes and fell in love with the superb audio quality of the accompanying ear piece. On a particular Saturday, I played lots of music till the battery became completely drained. Thats when my troubles started.
The next morning, I had it plugged to my laptop for a quick charge. Few minutes later, I was asked to update my iOS. Since it went smoothly the last time, I quickly clicked on the update button on iTunes. The update started and the next thing that came up was a message I spent the next one week looking for an answer to. The update stopped halfway and displayed errors 11 and 21. The phone had crashed and needed to be restored!
I immediately Googled it up on the internet and was told to observe the follows:
>>Make sure no other device is plugged into any of the USB ports on your computer.
>>Make sure your iTunes software is up to date.
>>Make sure you are using original USB cable from Apple.
>>Try plugging into another USB port.
>>Restart your computer.
Ok! My iTunes was up to date. I even uninstalled and reinstalled it. I was using the accompanying USB cable from Apple. I was plugged to the same port on which I had earlier updated the phone. Even though these conditions were met, I got same error when i tried again.
A further search turned up other recommendations:
>> Turn off anti virus.
>> Turn off system firewall.
>> Modify host files.
I did all these but the errors kept popping up. The worse thing was reading comments from people whose phones were restored after observing some of these procedures. Dont get me wrong o. I was not sad it worked for them. Only sad it didnt work for me.
Next, I was told it could be a hardware issue, and since there is no apple service center in Nigeria, I took it to a technician whom I later got to know could not tell the difference in millimeter between the four screws used on the iPhone PCB. After opening the phone, he placed the screws in the wrong holes and this caused the screen to go blue during update. At this point, he told me the board is damaged and there was nothing he could do. The only solution was to get a new PCB.
Frustrated and deeply unhappy, I took my phone home and left it unattended to for a week. One night, I decided to plug it to charge till the next morning after which i took it to my office. When I got to work, I plugged it in and started the restore and it restored and updated successfully but turned blue after booting up. At that point it dawned on me that the reason the phone was unable to update was because the battery was low. As for the blue screen, it was caused by the misplacement of the screws by the technician. I took it back to him and asked him to completely remove the screws since he could not differentiate between them.
I got back to my office, plugged my phone in and restored it via iTunes. Everything went well and the phone has been working ever since.
I would not have encountered all these troubles if Apple had stated charging your phone fully as a necessity before updating your iOS. So if you are having an issue like this after trying so many recommendations on the internet, try charging your phone overnight then try again.