iPhone sync on PC fails: Solution!

I went away for Thanksgiving. When I came back, my iPhone wouldn’t complete a sync with iTunes. This is what would happen:

  1. plug USB cable from iPhone to PC
  2. sync starts
  3. iTunes says “backing up iPhone… syncing iPhone”
  4. and then iTunes would stop. The iPhone disappeared from the Device List on iTunes. The phone kept saying “Sync in Progress”… forever :-(

And one time when I tried syncing, I got a message on my computer:

Attempting to copy to the disk “iphone” failed. The disk could not be read from or written to.

Here is how I fixed it:

I went into iTunes on my PC and deleted the video podcasts I had recently watched and subsequently deleted on my iPhone. It was several items from the “Best of Youtube” video podcast. I then synced the iPhone again, this time successfully. Hurray!

I’m not sure if this had anything to do with it but I also did the following:

When I was travelling, I had updated several iPhone apps directly on my iPhone. I went and updated the apps on iTunes and then synced. I’m pretty sure the fix I mentioned in the previous paragraph was what did it, but if not, try updating the iPhone apps on your computer.

Feel free to comment and tell me if this works for you!

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