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  • Writer's pictureAaron Harrington

iPhone 14 Pro Keeps Restarting - Which Circuit on the Motherboard is the Cause?



iPhone 14 Pro Run Over by Car

A signature and prevalent problem on the iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max is when the iPhone will only stay on for a couple minutes before restarting itself. This problem is sometimes accompanied by the "swipe up to recover" screen, however it also shows up on its own. This is a problem from data recovery perspective because the 3 minute reboot is not enough time to perform a backup of the phone. If the "swipe up to recover" screen is also present, then the 3 minutes is not enough time to get past that screen before rebooting, never allowing access to the ios. In most cases you are going to see this type of problem, an iphone that keeps restarting, after a severe impact or smash. In the case that I am working on, this iPhone 14 Pro was run over by a car before being sent to me for data recovery. It is also likely you will see this type of problem if your iPhone is dropped from a tall height or severely smashed in some other incident.


Below you can see pictured the "swipe up to recover" screen as well as the one that follows after inputting your passcode, the "attempting data recovery" screen. The latter of which will never have time to finish before your phone restarts.



In my case, I decided to circumvent this problem by moving over the NFC chip and fixing the related pads. The NFC chip is what causes the "swipe up to recover" screen so by moving over the original, I could get around it.


With access to the IOS

Once I had access to the ios I could check the panic logs to confirm the root cause of the reboot. You can see how to access your panic logs and what they mean at: https://repair.wiki/w/How_To_Fix_an_iPhone_14_Pro_That_Randomly_Restarts



In my recovery case we can see I have the "0x20000" error. This indicates motherboard failure rather then external parts. Thanks to some more detailed info from repairwiki (https://repair.wiki/w/How_To_Fix_an_iPhone_13_That_Randomly_Restarts) it was pointed out to me (Thanks Jesse Cruz and Michael Thomas!) that the 13 mini also needs bottom board to prevent a reboot. Specifically it is the gyroscope that is needed.




In the case of my iPhone 14 Pro, I was also missing gyro pads (as well as many others). Once the gyro pads were repaired and the board was put into a jig, the phone stabilized and would no longer reboot. This confirms that 0x20000 on the 14 series is caused by missing gyroscope. Having this chip on the bottom board is unique to 14 Pro series iPhones currently (besides 13 mini), so the 14 pro and pro max are likely the first series that we will see this problem persistently.




I have found the iPhone 14 series motherboards to be quite hardy so far. On some severe impacts, the motherboard is not damaged at all and only the parts are needed to be changed. I have also worked on several i14 series that have been run over and so far, every CPU has survived at least. If you face a similar problem and need an expert iPhone Data Recovery Service, please fill out my intake form for help: https://www.iboardrepair.com/ Thanks for reading!

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