Help! clean installed mac and now iphone unrecognized.

[DrG]

OK, I have my old 2G that I unlocked/jb and gave to my daughter. I had to do a clean install on the mac and now, the iTunes does not recognize the phone - I tried my 3GS as well, with the holding the home button as the USB goes it and it was also asking to restore my 3gS - I don't want to restore for fear that I might screw up the JB I did on the phone. Please help!

[macgirl]

Did you do a full back-up of the Mac before you did the clean install?

I just did a clean install on my Mac to install Snow Leopard. I cloned my hard drive to a portable USB drive beforehand so I could just copy files over from it to my Mac after the install. I copied everything in my Music folder over before syncing my iPhone (and had to re-authorize it for my account following some prompts) and iTunes did not force me to overwrite my iPhone and recognized it without problems. Do you have a copy of your iTunes folder from before the clean install?

[DrG]

No I didn't do a back up on the applications. I just used my external USB drive to copy my files. Would there be any other way to get this to work? Thanks again,.

[macgirl]

The applications on your iPhone should actually transfer without any problems using the "Transfer Purchases From..." option in the File menu in iTunes. See if you can at least do that first. There is software to pull your music off your iPhone and put it into your iTunes library - here's a recent thread (http://www.everythingicafe.com/forum/windows-pc-and-iphone/how-do-i-transfer-cd-music-from-iphone-to-laptop-52330.html) on this with some recommendations.

EDIT: That thread talks about PC software, but a Mac equivalent is PodWorks (http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/17443). I haven't used this one myself, but this is the type of application you can use...