The old iPhone 3G got stuck in an infinite restore loop after upgrading to iOS 6.1.2 this evening. As you might understand, the misses was not amused....
The infinite restore loop means that it keeps saying that it needs to be restored from within iTunes, but after doing that several times, you tend to loose faith. After trying it several times on a Windows laptop I tried it on my iMac. While it was restoring for the who knows how many times, I did some research on the Interwebs. The results were not encouraging.
I started gathering information, and some tools (like Tiny Umbrella) to break it from its infinite loop. After the restore the iPhone booted just fine. No idea what made it break its loop. Could be coincidence, could be my iMac. No idea.
Anyway, the misses is busy restoring the data. She (or iTunes) made a backup just before the backup. So all should be back to normal in a few minutes.