Black screen frozen spinning wheel

[Melodeath]

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IPhone 4S. About a week or two ago i grabbed my iphone after putting it down for five mins and noticed the screen wouldnt turn on. I then look more closely and see part of a spinning wheel on the screen, stuck and frozen. Maybe every five mins it spins a half circle and then is frozen again. Its the same circle that shows up in OSX right under the gray apple when it boots up. This was with iOS 5.0 and i figured maybe it had to do with the 5.0.1 iOS update that downloaded the night before.

I did a hard reset (hold power and home button) and phone returned to normal and still iOS 5.0. Phone is fine for a week or two and ive since updated to 5.0.1

Now today the same thing happened. Phone is working fine then i take it out of my pocket after 5 mins and it has the frozen circle screen. Hard reset. Back to normal.

Is anyone else seeing this? Just trying to guage if this is a software issue or if maybe my phone is defective

 

[scaredpoet]

I have seen one instance where my 4S is fully booted, but will gave me the spinning circle for a couple seconds. It went away and things returned to normal real quick though.

 

[dmarch]

I also had this on my iPhone 4. Did a DFU restore and it hasn't happened again.

 

[HellDiverUK]

My 3GS did the same thing. Did a wipe and restored from iCloud backup, not happened since. Mine did it the night DST stopped, not sure if the time changing confused things or not, or if it was just coincidence.

 

[TruckdriverSean]

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I've had it happen a couple of times. Both times during/after using the camera.

 

[gothamguy]

Happened to me 2 weeks ago. I opened Google Voice, hit the button to send a text and the screen went blank with the wheel frozen. Even now and again the wheel would spin and then freeze again.

I didn't know about the hard reset so it stayed like that for about 2 hours (I was in a meeting) until it finally came back to life. Burned 80% of my battery and left 15 or so crash logs in diagnostics. Hasn't happened again though.

 

[Melodeath]

Ugh, happened three times now. Can't find any common apps causing it. Usually happens during a text convo, but I'm almost always in the middle of a text convo, so it's hard to judge

 

[aztooh]

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I've had it happen a couple of times. Both times during/after using the camera.

Happened to me last night, while trying to use the camera from the lock screen. Thought the phone was randomly rebooting, but it just 'flashed' back to normal after a few seconds.

For having a superior 'user experience', there sure seem to be a lot of bugs.

FWIW, I didn't restore my 4S from my 3g backup. Imported my contacts through the cloud via gmail set up as exchange and just redownloaded my apps through the 4S. Only plugged the phone in to set up wifi sync.

 

[asdubro]

My solution

Hi everyone, my name is Gustavo and I live in Brazil, so my English is not the best. After spending a few days with the same problem as described, I found a solution and I’d like to share.

I have a jailbroken Iphone 4 that got frozen after an upgrade on Cydia. Same thing as the others, Apple logo for a few minutes and than a semi-frozen spinning wheel.

After some research, and innumerous attempts, I found a way to put your phone alive again. Download the latest version of Redsnow, go to extras, put your device on DFU mode and hit “Just boot” button, that will boot your device tethered. A few minutes later, my phone was working again …. but tethered.

After getting my phone back, I decided to find what happened, and how to solve it.

If you don’t know for sure what caused, the best thing is to restore your phone using Itunes. So, the process is easy to find on Youtube, and you just have to search for restore iphone.

Still, I had to find what made my phone freeze… Well, in my case the solution was related to a stupid idea I had a few days ago. I’m running iOS 5.0.1, but I had an App the required 5.1.1 for the latest upgrade… The genius here, edited the information inside the iphone using Ifunbox, and changed the iOS version number from 5.0.1 to 5.1.1. GREAT, I could bypass the limitation from my app, and downloaded the latest version.

Two days ago, I decided to upgrade my data counter app, that I had installed by Cydia. When I did it, Cydia decided to uninstall Corona Untether, once my system was running “5.1.1”, and this Corona needs an iOS 5.0.1 or 5.0… So, long story made short, when I upgraded Data Counter and lost Corona Untether, I lost the capability to boot my phone.

I changed my iOS version number back to 5.0.1, installed Corona again and rebooted smoothly.

I hope that this info may help you guys.

Best regards.