Yikes. Just had a gigantic scare. I’ve been putting off the iOS 5 update on my iPad 1, but lately I’ve been taking a hard look at Apple’s office-related apps… namely Pages (word processor) and Numbers (spreadsheets). Both are feature-rich apps which can create really beautiful documents – and they are probably the most capable apps of their kind on the iPad. Well, those apps require the latest version of the iPad’s operating system, iOS 5. So I figured it was time.
I performed a backup of my iPad via iTunes and then started the update process. 10-15 minutes or so later, I was greeted with a really scary error message that made my hair stand on end.
Here it is almost 2 in the morning, and it appears I’ve just bricked the portable computer I use on a daily basis.
Apparently, the 1611 error I received isn’t terribly uncommon… and also has a wide variety of possible causes.
In a fit of common sense troubleshooting, I explored a theory that I didn’t find mentioned anywhere in Apple’s troubleshooting documentation for this error. For this first year of iPad ownership, I’ve been syncing and updating the device via a USB port on the side of my Dell monitor. It’s worked great every time til now. But even though they are attached to a powered device (the monitor), USB ports which aren’t directly on the motherboard are generally regarded as being part of a USB “hub” – which can sometimes have limited throughput (data transfer rate) issues compared to those on the motherboard.
So it occurred to me, maybe the problem was that for such a large software update, the limited data rate was getting in the way.
I safely disconnected my iPad and reattached it to a USB port directly on the PC.
With one click of a button in iTunes, and about 30 minutes of waiting, the firmware, operating system, apps, and data were all restored and ready to go.
Whew!
Smart thinking, Phil. Glad you saved your iPad. Of course, this is why you are president of PRR Computers.