Friday, July 25, 2008

IPhone 2.0 synchronization - MDCrashReportTool closed unexpectedly

I was getting the following message when synchronizing my iPhone with firmware 2.0 to iTunes: "MDCrashReportTool closed unexpectedly". This is cause by a bug in Apple's crash reporting tool which make it crash when retrieving bug reports from the iPhone (pretty ironic ;-)). 

To avoid the issue, you can open a Mac OS terminal widow, and type the following command (one line):

sudo chmod a-x /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/MobileDevice.framework/Versions/A/Resources/AppleMobileDeviceHelper.app/Contents/Resources/MDCrashReportTool

This simply prevents the tool from running. Note this is a workaround and not a fix, and it will completely disables the bug reporting functionality (but it was crashing anyway ...).

5 comments:

Unknown said...

You should not be messing with permissions on system files.

A better fix is to restore tour iPhone through iTunes

Boris said...

Thanks for the advice. Yes I know restoring the phone will fix the issue. However my understanding is that it will fix the problem because after the restore the crash logs will be removed, and therefore MDCrashReportTool won't crash trying to send them. But as soon as something wrong happens on the phone there will be some crash reports again to make it crash, which is why I went for a more aggressive solution as I don't want to be restoring the phone constantly. My plan is that the next update of iTunes will fix this and I can then set the permissions back to normal.

If I am missing something here please correct me I will be happy to hear the popper explanation :-)

Boris said...

To answer a quetion I received by e-mail, to undo the temporary fix you can type:
sudo chmod a+x /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/MobileDevice.framework/Versions/A/Resources/AppleMobileDeviceHelper.app/Contents/Resources/MDCrashReportTool

Also, it will be automatically undone each time you upgrade iTunes.

Anonymous said...

Reinstalling and restoring did not help at all.

I have reinstalled iTunes and completely restored the iPhone 3G as new (which means a lot of work reinstalling and setting up everything), I first tried the normal restore which just restores the problem. restoring as new quiets this problem for a few days (2) now its back; just as annoying as before.

Boris said...

Thanks for the feedback caicedo. Actually it confirms what I was saying: even if you restore, as soon as a crash occurs again on the iPhone then iTunes tries to get the crash report again and the problem comes back.