DISABLED iPhone, RESTORATION and Lessons

For some reasons, my wife's iPhone and the Passcode that she uses did not work anymore, leading to a DISABLED iPhone.

With the aid of Google and Youtube, I tried my best techie effort to try to restore her iPhone without losing any data. My feeble attempt worked to no avail and just deprived me of precious sleeping hours.

A trip to the nearest PowerMac by my wife proved to be just time wasted as paperworks were required to prove ownership prior to restoration. PowerMac staff said that data may still be lost upon restoration procedures.

My bestfriend ACE, is a techie guy and well-versed in Apple stuff but needs to attend to his wife who was admitted to hospital. 

His advice is just to try restoration that will lose all data, much like re-formatting a hard drive. Anyway, that will be the procedure that PowerMac will most likely do. And then retrieve whatever data saved on the iCloud.

So, for the better part of this Sunday, I tried to restore wife's iPhone with ACE's technical support over phone calls.

I downloaded iPhone firmware that took about 3 hours. Then tried the restoration. It turned out I need to press the shift key before clicking the RESTORE button in iTunes. Then, find the downloaded iPhone firmware for the restoration to proceed properly.

I thought thats the end of it, but no. 

The iPhone could not be restored because the disk I was attempting to use is full.

Can you believe that? Apple requires larger free storage capacity to be able to restore an iPhone. I needed to clear around 5 Gb out of my laptop's hard disk. Tsk. Tsk.

And there, finally, my wife's iPhone was restored to its factory setting.

Some important lessons to iPhone users:

1. Never ever forget your passcode.

2. Do not put your iPhone beside you when you sleep. You might inadvertently press it repeatedly, leading to it being disabled.

3. Always back-up your iPhone via iTunes. iCloud's storage capacity is limited.