Product news, tech notes and opinions from Castagna.net

In yesterday’s post, I chronicled some of the issues I was having with updating my iPhone 4 to Apple’s shiny new iOS5.

I was certainly not suffering in solitude yesterday. Twitter was going crazy with people experiencing not only the same Error #3002 that I was seeing, but many other errors as well. As far as I know, Apple has not released any official cause for these issues, but rumors continue to swirl that all errors that people were seeing were a result of the demand for the new operating system.

I’m not totally convinced, however, that the #3002 error I was receiving was just a matter of overloaded servers. Of course, I’ve got no way to confirm my suspicions, so I’ll just move on and take away the lesson of “don’t try to upgrade on the first day.”

Unfortunately, that pesky #3002 error was not the only problem I had yesterday.

When I tried to update my iPad to iOS5, the first problem I encountered was the download time for the update package. That one I’m happy to attribute to overloaded servers. But once the download completed, that’s where the real fun began.

I had backed up both of my devices prior to performing the update process. Always a good thing to do, if possible, and it’s highly encouraged by Apple.

The update process itself, albeit slowly, completed without any issue including the restoration of the device…so I was led to believe by iTunes.

When I powered on the device after the update, the only thing greeting me was the basic app suite included with iOS5. None of my previous apps had been restored after all. Not a problem, I tried to do a restore. No such luck, even though there was a valid backup available from just prior to starting down the update path.

Fortunately, all is not last as some might think. I was able to access the “purchased” tab in the AppStore and view a list of apps that had been previously installed on the device. While it a was a minor pain having to reinstall each and every app, I did get all of them back on to the iPad.

Same thing was true with iBooks. I went into the store and clicked on purchased which allowed me to bring my purchased books back down.

The only casualties of the iPad upgrade to iOS5 were the loss of some .pdf books/papers I had installed in iBooks, a few movies I had copied to the iPad, and the music that I had copied to it. Over all, not too bad.

Today, I had the opportunity to update two brand new Verizon iPhone 4 handsets. Why didn’t I get the i4s you might ask? Well, price was the big factor, but secondarily, I wanted to voice my displeasure with Apple not releasing a new phone to go with the new iOS. Believe me, had they offered an i5, I would’ve been all over it as I’ve been waiting to upgrade two Blackberrys for a very, very long time.

Biggest thing I needed was a replacement for Blackberry Messenger (the security aspect) and iOS5 does the trick for me with iMessage.

Fortunately, updating these two phones went off without any problems whatsoever. Not a single Error #3002 was raised, nor were the download times appearing to be extraordinarily long. Maybe Apple did something on their end to increase capacity, or perhaps demand has dropped enough which I tend to doubt given the number of devices in the wild that can be updated to iOS5. Whatever the case, I happy things went smoothly.

Now I can get back to my regularly scheduled programming already in progress.

Dear Apple, No iPhone5 yet? OK...but thank you for iOS5!

Like most everyone who was let down by Apple’s announcement on October 4, 2011 that there would not be a truly new iPhone 5 being released, we did take a little bit of comfort in the fact that iOS5 was to be released today, October 12, 2011.

It was a good day for me for the release – I didn’t have any client meetings, I’m not up against any massive deadlines, not much to do except eagerly await the announcement that iOS5 was ready to be loaded onto my iPhone 4 and my iPad – not to mention the two new iPhones that are somewhere in transit.

A little bit after 2pm Eastern US Time, my constant clicking of the “Check for Update” button was rewarded with the dialog box that iOS5 was now available. I could feel a little flutter in my belly as I clicked the “Continue” button. I acknowledged that some items had not been transferred to iTunes – everything had been as I had backed up my phone several times throughout the morning – and started the process.

First time, it crashed with an Error #3002 – An unknown error has occurred. Great, not even the great Apple knows what the error code being thrown means. Quick – Bing to the rescue…

Only thing I could find was some early beta developers encountering this error and were able to load the software from a specific location while performing a ‘Restore’ instead of an ‘Update’. Unfortunately for me on my Windows7 box, I could not replicate the steps detailed in their posts.

But, I’m stubborn – figured I’d try it again. Clicked the mighty ‘Update’ button and eventually received the same Error #3002. Now, in this dialog box, there is a ‘More Information’ button. My experience with these on my Windows machines, is the ‘More Information’ takes you to something that could be considered “more information” – but if you don’t read Hex, and weren’t part of the original product dev team, it’s completely useless information.

Kudos to Apple, though…the ‘More Information’ that was provided included a small link to “advanced troubleshooting” tips for specific errors, including the 3002 error I’d been encountering.

Two pieces of advice stuck out at me – 1) Restart the computer. Ok, I can do that.

Piece #2 was “disconnect all other USB devices”. Ok, considering that my keyboard/mouse are USB devices, that’s not completely practical. However, it did occur to me – I had my iCord plugged in to a USB hub. Even though it’s a powered hub, it just might not be up to the task, so I plugged the iCord in to an “installed” USB port (after the restart) and gave the update another shot.

Well, the first time through, it threw the #3002 back into my face. Mocking me. As I said earlier, I’m pretty stubborn, so I tried it again.

Apparently, my stubbornness has paid off…I’m about 5 seconds away from a completed restore from backup after installing iOS5!

I’m going to verify this with the iPad next, but if you run in to this iOS5 Error #3002, my advice would be to:

a) Restart your computer, and

b) Make sure you’ve got your iCord plugged in to an installed USB port.

It may not be a fool-proof solution, but it did work on the iPhone 4…I’m happily looking at iOS5 reporting that it’s been successfully installed.