Bricked iPhone? is it recoverable?

[qbazdz]

Hi,

My dad has a very old iPhone 4 (A1332) which recently just packed up and gets stuck on the apple logo (bootloader?).
I can't help him in person as he is travelling but he popped into a few shops and they tried a few things with no luck.
I asked him to get the iTunes on and hook it up to his laptop and on connection iTunes attempted to do auto recovery and failed with restoring it with 'unknown error (9)' message.

I'm more of an Android guy so can't really help him, but suspect the phone is a goner. Any ideas?

 

[ChrisD.]

Has he tried an Apple shop? Given the age of the phone it wouldn’t be surprising if it’s some form of a hardware issue. Is it backed up at all?

 

[qbazdz]

Yep - I directed him there too, but where he is currently there aren't many around.
He is not totally keen on changing the handset, but equally there is not much data on it that he would actually miss.

 

[radderfire]

Somebody somewhere will be able to fix it I expect, but it's finding them. It's the kind of thing some guy in a backstreet market in India would be able to fix. Bound to be some places in the UK too. However, it sounds like upgrade time to me, if he can afford it.