Apple iPhone and iTunes just doesn’t go hand in hand, especially when you are in the middle of something important, say, restoration process.
You are trying to keep yourself busy restoring iPhone 4 or iPod Touch, but iTunes pelts you with an error 1004? And while the error floats on the screen, your iPhone 4 and iPod Touch is stuck in recovery mode?
The iPhone “iPhone 4” could not be restored. An unknown error occurred (1004)
The fix is easy.
- If you want to put iPhone out of recovery mode, I’d suggest you to use TinyUmbrella. Simply launch TinyUmbrella — works on both Mac and Windows OS — and click on Exit Recovery. You can also use Recboot to boot out of recovery mode.
- Open the hosts file of your Mac, and remove the gs.apple.com line entirely. Save the file. Relaunch iTunes and the error message window should no longer pop up.
- Another solution I found on Apple Discussion Forum is to logout of iTunes Store and login again, then begin the restoration process. This fix seemed to have worked for a lot of iPhone 4 owners.
- Setting the date and time to the correct values can kick the error 1004 message out from iTunes.