Wife and I have identical Iphone 2G's. Wife's phone went dog some while ago while traveling. Returned to me saying it didn't work, and battery was flat as wouldn't take a charge. I plugged it in and up it came, I used it for a week to test, it was perfect. Then I RESET AND CLEARED from the menu to give back so she could sync with her computer. Thats when it returned to non - operable state. I suspect if I wait until battery is flat it might come back, but I am stumped. Here is the technical:

Itunes 8.1

Windows XP SP3

Iphone 2G when plugged in shows as device not recognized and shows in USB tree as unknown device.

So far:

Reinstalled Itunes, Mobile device manager, Bonjour.

Tried on different PC, and a Mac.

Tried Iphone in DFU mode, recovery mode and just plugged in.

Changed cables.

I have another Iphone which is recognized normally. Bought same day, IE same batch.

Trawled the internet. Points to Hardware failure.

Anyone had this issue?

Any Solutions?

Am I missing an obvious fix? I hope so! That would be odd, as I am a genius.

Many thanks

Try a different connection cable. I had a similar problem with my phone and it turned out to be a bad cable. Other option is to use the blue tooth to connect the phone and computer. You can buy a blue tooth dongle very cheap. Hope it helped

This is clearly not an uncommon problem, and nowhere do I see a solution, so here is mine:

In my case, the fault has been traced to a hardware issue in the connector port on the phone.

The port was replaced in MBK while we waited and seems fine now.

I am very glad not to have been trying to solve this anywhere else. "We have to send it away...."