Frozen iPad with USB and iTunes icons

[Baoluo]

My (older version) iPad does not show anything except a picture of a USB cable with an arrow pointing it to an icon labelled 'iTunes'. It doesn't change if I press the iPad button, and if I hold the on/off switch down to restart it just reappears. Since the iPad has no USB connection I have no idea what I am supposed to do.

 

[KevinJS]

The iPad needs to be plugged into a PC running iTunes, using a 30 pin cable.

You can then set it up for use in iTunes, either as a new iPad of from a backup, if you have one.

 

[Baoluo]

Thanks, but ultimately it failed. I belatedly realised that the power cord was a 30 pin to USB cable, so I attached it to an older MacBook Pro running iTues. This told mt the iPad needed to be restored, so I clicked on that and it spent about half an hour downloading software and a couple minutes after that processing it. When it finished there was no further message, so I tried out the iPad, but it still had exactly the same problem.

I tried it again with a more recent MacBook Pro and the same thing happened, except it took closer to an hour because there seemed more to update (according to the list that was given). I actually tried this twice, since the first time there was apparently an interrution to the internet, but in any case the result was the same, no change.

Anything further that might be done? Was there some additional step I should have taken that I just didn't see?

 

[J. A.]

Hi, Baoluo! Welcome to iPF!

Here's the description, so you can see what has to be done: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1808
Hope that helps.

 

[Baoluo]

Much thanks for that. It ultimately succeeded, but I don't know what it had to be so tortuous.

I gather the difference is that I had to start with the iPad off and iTunes not running. I tried this first with my older MacBook Pro, and it checked out the iPad in a different (much shorter) way than before, but told me it couldn't fix anything due to error 3194, which apparently meant my iTunes was out of date. I updated iTunes, and then even though I tried it starting with iPad and iTunes off, it handled it in the earlier way, insisting on spending about an hour to download something that ultimately did nothing (though I had to try it a number of times, since if I didn't watch it a message that my iPad needed to be restored would pop up, and if I didn't attend to it I'd get a message that the internet was interrupted so I'd need to start again. Shish!).

Finally I tried it again on my newer MacBook Pro and everything went smoothly and the iPad was restored in just a few minutes. But why does it have to have all the other complications? It's not what one normally expects from Apple.

I'm grateful for the help you two gave. Perhaps I should have been able to figure it out from earlier notes and FAQs, but my experience with the thing was such it was difficult to be sure I was actually on the right track.