If Genius Bar says it can not be fixed, do I give up?

Shutting down your iPhone while it is charging will not mess anything up. It is perfectly safe to do so. You can see if it is a software problem by doing a DFU restore. That will wipe everything off the phone and reinstall the software. As long as it is synced to your iTunes account you shouldn't lose anything, but don't restore from a backup created while you were jailbroken.

You obviously had a dumb Genius. Or one that wouldn't help you because you had a jailbroken phone.

Any iPhone can by put into DFU mode by holding the sleep and home button for exactly 10 seconds, then releasing the sleep button and continue holding the home button for another 5 seconds.

Then restore "As New" in iTunes. You'll have to rejailbreak your phone after, but it's not entirely difficult and it's the price you pay for jailbreaking. That's why I don't do it. It messes with the original software used to run the phone, so maybe it won't have any permanent effects, but I feel like my phone didn't run half as smoothly when I jailbroke.

There's almost no way that by shutting off your phone while charging, you damaged your battery. I wouldn't waste your money. It's almost definitely a software issue, which unfortunately will result in a restore and a loss of data.

There's hope!

I had an iPhone 3G that I accidentally restored but forgot to sync all the camera roll photos to my computer so I thought I lost them all. After a few hours of research, I found articles here and there from people who made the same mistake. Long story short, you must download some software and make an image of your phone. My 3G was 8gigs so it took over 3 hours for the software to create an image. But after that I used a program called "Recuva" and had it scan the created image to recover all my photos. It worked great. I also had a buddy of mine who recovered stuff from his 3GS using the same method. But I have never done this to the iPhone 4.

To create an image of the iPhone, I did have to use an computer that was running on linux.

Then I copied the iPhone image to a windows computer and ran Recuva (free) to the image and recovered everything.

There's other software that got my contacts out of the phone.

There are step by step directions somewhere I found using google.

Time consuming, but it worked for me. Remember to sync with iTunes next time. Good luck.

Haven't you honestly thought that if one day my phone goes dead on me, how do I get my stuff?

Just like a computer, all my data is on it, and one day if something goes wrong, I can fix the computer and I would have my data on a hard drive.

Making an image of your software will NOT have it stay there after a restore. What it will do is give you access to your files so you can get them back on your phone AFTER the restore.

whattodo said:

Haven't you honestly thought that if one day my phone goes dead on me, how do I get my stuff?

Just like a computer, all my data is on it, and one day if something goes wrong, I can fix the computer and I would have my data on a hard drive.

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All of my stuff is actually on my Macbook Pro. If it's on my iPhone, it's just a copy that came from my Macbook Pro. My Macbook Pro is backed up via several methods.

I smell a huge load of BS. You cannot crash an iPhone by turning it off while charging.

If you don't sync your phone or backup your data, then your data is worthless to you. It has nothing to do with the Genius Bar.

Dalton63841 said:

Making an image of your software will NOT have it stay there after a restore. What it will do is give you access to your files so you can get them back on your phone AFTER the restore.

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Make an image of your iPhone. Not software.
And the OP did not hav his iPhone jailbroken.

If iTunes recognizes your phone, why can't you back it up before you restore it???

whattodo said:

Can I back up before I restore when it's already dead? I think you need to have made backups already in your itunes before you restore.

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If you plug up the phone to your pc and open iTunes it should let you save what's on the phone.

What does it show when you open iTunes? Does it show your phone?

lol why people continue to think using an iPhone as standalone computer is a good idea is baffling

I backup the files from my computer onto another hard drive, it's the same for the files on your iPhone.

good luck op

OP, although there is always the possibility that you can recover files from your iPhone if you do a restore (which essentially reformats the phone's flash memory and reinstalls the OS), you are also taking a big risk by doing so.

A format essentially wipes the filesystem table of contents and reinitializes parts of the file system. If a format wrote all zeros to the entire disk, not only would it take forever, but that would be bad for flash memory (since you have a limited number of write cycles). So the other posters are right that you MIGHT be able to recover some files, since you only risk overwriting at most as much data as however much space the OS itself takes up (300MB or so?), but you also risk not being able to recover ALL of your files even if you can recover some.

Also, programs like Recuva essentially scan a drive for recognizable file signatures. So, it knows what certain popular file formats look like and can determine with a fair amount of accuracy where file types that it knows about start and end. This means that you have a good chance that it can recover photos, music, and movies, since the software likely knows how to identify JPG, PNG, MP3, ACC, and MOV/MP4 files. But anything else on the iPhone -- such as your contacts database, notes, calendar items (if you're not syncing them over the air to the cloud somewhere like MobileMe or Google Calendar), iBooks, saved mail (if you are using POP3), and other data from any of your other apps purchased from the App Store -- is probably going to be lost because they are stored either in SQLite database files (doubtful that most free file recovery software is going to be looking for SQLite file signatures, or even knows what they look like) or in some other proprietary format.

So do the restore and subsequent image of your iPhone only as a very last resort.

Now, you mentioned what you thought you might have DONE to cause the issue (and I agree with everyone else...whatever happened, it wasn't your fault and you did nothing wrong, other than fail to back up your stuff ), but you haven't actually explained to us what the SYMPTOMS of the problem are that you currently have. You said that during shutdown, the battery went from 90% to nearly empty. However, you don't say anything about what happens when you try to turn the phone back on now, today. Do you get the blinking red battery symbol? Do you get the Apple Logo of Death (logo shows up and never goes away no matter how long you wait)? Does it get past that but then freeze up or restart the bootup process? What does it actually do? What about if you plug the phone into USB power somewhere, either in a computer or in your USB "wall wart" that the phone came with? Will it start up then? Does it just go to the red battery symbol and never get past that no matter how long you have it plugged in?

You haven't told us anything really useful about the actual symptoms, which makes it very hard to advise you on your next step.

-- Nathan

This isn't a "wiped" phone that you are trying to pull data from is it? This whole deal sounds fishy....

It's obvious the name "Genius" isn't based on an actual test result.

And thats what happens folks when you dont do backups often.
Dont wait a year to backup your devices, electronics do break at times.
Be prepared.

Applejuiced said:

And thats what happens folks when you dont do backups often.
Dont wait a year to backup your devices, electronics do break at times.
Be prepared.

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Electronics break? Weird!