Chosen Solution

phone had been run over by car, glass cracked and it is charging but all it goes is the apple flashes on the screen. the battery had been dead awhile. charging now for approx. 3.5 hours

skip the restore advice until you get a new battery. Interpret the flashing apple logo as “i’m not getting enough juice to boot!” Stop trying to charge it—you may have a short somewhere and short + charger = constant heat and you can create a bigger problem than you already have. You may have a disconnected battery socket from the logic board, or a damaged charging circuit. If you attempt to do two things—keep the phone on via the USB cable attached to a computer while simultaneously sending data back and forth through that cable via restoring, then it won’t work. phone will conk out mid-restore and this may make it difficult the restore later. You need to first get power into the phone.

When tho happens it’s usually a new battery that is needed have had this problem before don’t restore because you will lose all your data

iPhones take averagely 2 hours to fully charge. Have you opened it up to see if any damage has been done to the logic board? If you are for sure there is no damage, try this:

  1. Throw your phone into DFU mode by pressing the lock and home button for 10 seconds. In 10 seconds, release the lock button and keep holding the home button. Hold the home button for 30 seconds, and you should stay with a black screen. If the apple logo shows back up, you’ll need to try the process again.
  2. Restore your iPhone. You may need to update to 7.1.1.
  3. If you run into any error codes, make sure you leave an answer of the error code and I’ll be glad to help you.

That’s recovery mode. Try to do DFU again.

Disconnect the battery connector and plug-in the power cable, this way you can see if the battery was causing the problem. Let us know if the phone boots properly.