So you’re ready to go and you’re frantically hitting update on your iPhone, iPad or iPod. You may find you’re getting the following error;
Unable to Check for Update
An error occurred while checking for a software update.
This is sadly because of the demand being placed on the Apple update servers. You can keep hitting Try Again, or plug your phone in to the latest version of iTunes and update via that. Make sure you have a backup before you get started!
The better half recently got an iPhone 3GS to replace her 3G. The main reason being that the iOS5 announcement included the 3GS but not the 3G – that’s been abandoned by Apple, and if I’d paid circa £500 for it 18 months back, I’d be pretty annoyed.
So before selling it to an electronic ‘recycling’ company, it needed to be formatted and returned to factory settings, this proved a little problematic. By that, I mean the following error;
The iPhone “iPhone” could not be restored. An unknown error occured (2003). Searching Apple’s support website had no fix for error 2003, it wasn’t even listed.
The problem is initially caused if you’re connected on a USB 1 port. My PC is fairly new so I seemed puzzled by this, but then I remembered a lot of the front panel ports don’t run at proper USB 2 – so switched it to the back of the PC.
Still though, error 2003 returned.
Those with iPhones will know that the supplied USB lead is pretty short, so I was using one of those USB extension leads – about a foot long. So I removed that, and hey presto the update started working.
Until. The same as the above, but this time error 14. Apple had a support article for this though, here.
I checked the cable I was using and it wasn’t an official Apple one, a cheap spare from eBay. So I switched to the official Apple cable to do the restore. Hey presto. It’s all working now.