Chosen Solution

Someone has tried the PIN too many times and disabled my iPhone. I have no sort of backup of my phone. I have 6 years worth of data on this phone, so will need to recover the data at all cost.I do not have any trusted PC but I know my PIN code and have access to my iCloud account. What I have tried so far :

  1. Plugging the iPhone to a PC (Normal Mode) : This dint do anything, the phone merely vibrates when plugging it in normal mode. iTunes dosent detect the phone as well.
  2. Plugging the iPhone to a PC (Recovery Mode) : This gave me some hope. iTunes detected that the phone was in recovery mode. How ever I got the “There is a problem with the iPhone “iPhone” that requires it to be updated or restored”. So I decided that the phone’s OS needs to be updated to 12.3.1. So i update it and the phone finishes the update and goes into normal mode. The phone is still locked. I thought maybe the update had failed so I tried it again. No luck, same error. Possible Solutions ? Now I am here with 3UTools, not sure what to do. Is there something I can do in DFU mode ? This seems like a really trivial thing, and there has to be a simple solution to this without a factory reset and wiping the data. Any help is appreciated. I am willing to go to all lengths to preserve the data. I don’t mind opening up the phone and maybe doing something with the hardware (i.e. battery reset if there is such a thing). I have the iFixit toolkit and have repaired an iPad before so that should not be a problem. Update (3UTools Atempt): I read what @benjamen50 had mentioned here : iPhone is disabled, connect to itunes. I followed the exact same steps he mentioned. I tried flashing 12.3.1 version firmware onto the phone from recovery mode. So once the flash was completed, it booted up into normal mode and showed me the same screen. Is this normal or should it go back to Recovery Mode ?

There’s no way around the lock, disconnecting the battery doesn’t make any difference unfortunately, I believe timer info is stored on the Nand. Either you wait for the timer to zero and allow you to input your passcode or you’ll have to wipe the phone and lose your data.

Connect the iPhone to a computer it has synced to before with a USB cable and launch iTunes. Choose “Sync” in iTunes and enter the proper passcode when requested to unlock the device, this backs up the iPhone to the computer. Choose “Restore” to restore the iPhone from the most recent backup. Make sure your PC is sync with iTunes. If it’s not then try to connect with the support team. Regards, Lewis

It seams that your are almost expert，and I’m sorry that if you don’t want to lose data on the phone, and you want to fix disabled iPhone, it’s impossible, unless you have the screen password to unlock it after limitation time on the iPhone. No considering of iPhone data, you can force factory reset iPhone to fix disabled iPhone, it’s the last free way, or use the tool to fix disabled iPhone, but also lose all data on iPhone.