Wednesday, May 25, 2011

How to Fix "Itunes cannot read the contents of the iphone"

You might be faced with this situation at times when you have a jailbroken iPhone/iPod Touch. You might have played around with some CYDIA apps, most notably the apps which try to modify the contents of iTunes Database File. One of those apps is MewSeek which lets you add the songs to the iTunes library directly from your iPhone/iPod Touch. Well sometimes it corrupts the following two files iTunesDB and iTunesCDB.

You will get the following message on iTunes “Itunes cannot read the contents of the iphone. Go to the summary tab in IPhone preferences and click restore to restore this iphone to factory settings”.

If you didn’t Jailbreak and you are in this situation, you have no choice but to do a full system restore on your iDevice and rely on a backup. But if you have jailbroken your iDevice, you can use iPhoneBrowser or iFunBox to explore the contents and fix it yourself without doing a restore. You might have to copy your songs/ringtones/videos back again but you still have everything else. The Songs etc are there on the device its just that the DB files are corrupted. So using iPhoneBrowser or iFunBox navigate to the following directory
/var/mobile/Media/iTunes_Control

Now within the above directory you will find two more directories

Music
Under Music, delete the following directory - itunes_db_checked

iTunes
Under iTunes, delete the following two files - iTunesDB and iTunesCDB

Disconnect the iDevice and reconnect. iTunes will detect it fine and you may or may not have your media. Try the option below which might help with just reusing the backed up DB files. You can also use iPhoneBackupExtractor to get the same DB files and see if they help.

FYI - You may try copying the iTunesDB and iTunesCDB from tmp folder back to iTunes directory to see if your songs/ringtones/videos come back
This is all you need to get your iDevice back in shape without a restore.

31 comments:

  1. thank you so much it work and helped me alot because i have over 40 apps that needed to be synced

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  2. It's work on my iphone 3GS.. Thank u so much...

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  3. thank you so much for the explaination...appreciate that..it works out well eventually

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  4. Thanks man worked beautifully

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  5. many thanks, I worked perfect, but after that the capacity of my iphone is lower, the bar "other" has grown, now weighs 4.7 GB, my iPhone is 16 GB, I can do to reduce this? was reading and as they say this is when manual files are deleted, the recommendation to do is restore the factory, but I want to avoid this because I have jailbrake, and I will not be from scratch again ... please help

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  6. Thanks! I have had this issue twice. I looked everywhere the first time and knew exactly where to come for a solution the second! Again thanks!

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  7. Thanks man you saved my life

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  8. In the folders all I found was 'iTunesCDB' and I deleted that and started iTunes and it automatically started syncing! YAH! Thank you so much! YOU ROCK!!!

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  9. Cool...man that worked like a charm. Thank yo so much.

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  10. Superb, what a blog it is! This web site gives useful information to us, keep
    it up.
    my web page > How to Repair the data files in Microsoft Outlook

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  11. THANK YOU SO MUCH YOU MADE MY DAY! :)

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  12. This worked for me with a few variations :)

    I do not have a jailbroken phone but I still downloaded iFunBox.

    I went to Raw Files>iTunes control>iTunes and deleted the file iTunes CDB

    When I restarted iTunes it recognized my phone without that awful pop up message saying it couldn't read the contents of the phone. THANKS!!!!

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  13. thank you so much..worked on my 3GS too..

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  14. you r the man! Works on my iPad 2 iOS 5.01!! Cheers!

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  15. thanks guys it help so much thanks

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  16. Bad Luck!
    This has worked before for me, but not this time. I removed the iTunesDB file, disconnected, then reconnected. iTunes will still Not read the contents of my phone.
    Is there another option?
    I then also removed the whole DB Folder (dhcpclient; launchd.db; PanicReporter; Timezone; dhcp_leases)
    Still no luck.
    Anyone know why it is no longer working?
    Help!

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  17. tnxxx....my problem is done.hehe.

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  18. Not sure if Apple has changed anything with the latest firmware. I highly doubt it but u never know. I am myself no longer using iPhone so can't investigate..

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  19. hey nitesh pls help i did wat u wrote and now its doesn't shows this error, but all my music files have gone and now when i copy music to my iphone it freezes and itunes becomes not responding. same it happens if i transfer purchases from my iPhone. pls help.

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  20. I dnt have the itunes db file on it...what shall i do??

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  21. Those who havent jailbroken, please use iphone explorer and delete the file itunesCDB under Itunes folder in your iphone.

    Wolla ! it will sync

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  22. Worked for me. Thank you very much.

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  23. Great, Thank you so much!

    Truong.lp@gmail.com

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  24. Awesome! Still works on 3gs untethered JB ios6.1!

    Thanks!!!

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  25. Worked for me. Iphone 3gs on IOs 6.0 JB of course.

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  26. Thank you so much; I thought I would have to restore and rejailbreak my iPod, but this fixed the problem. After I done this, I unlocked my iPod and went to the Music app and all my starting appearing in the list.

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  27. no. that is not entirely correct. I have a non-jailbroken iphone 4s and I managed to fix my problem with ifunbox guided by your instructions.

    Just go to Raw files then itunes_control folder.

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  28. only found itunesCDB under music then deleted it ..it worked ..thank you

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  29. "If you didn’t Jailbreak and you are in this situation, you have no choice but to do a full system restore on your iDevice and rely on a backup."

    I did not jailbreak my iPhone and deleting itunesCDB via iFunbox (Windows 7, iPhone 4s) still worked perfectly! Thanks

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  30. Another reason could be that there is dirt / lint in the slot where the cable connects to your phone. (seriously!) I just had this error on my iphone 5 - turns out there was a lint ball in the small slot on the bottom of the phone. The contact was sufficient to allow charging, but must have been blocking one of the pins. After I cleaned it with a toothpick, I plugged it back into my computer and itunes worked normally.

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  31. Helped me fix my daughters iphone 4s (deleting iTunesCDB), thanks!

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