My iPhone 4s randomly went into recovery mode and I can't restore it with iTunes...what do I do?

Question

Last night my iPhone randomly went into recovery mode on me. Just before I went to sleep a bunch of static lines appeared across the screen. The screen went dark and a few seconds later the Apple logo appeared. A few seconds later is disappeared. A few seconds later it came back. So on and so forth. I thought I had turned it off and was going to deal with it in the morning, but when I woke up the iPhone still just had the Apple logo going on and off again.
I've tried everything today. All the different button hold methods out there. I've tried to sync it to iTunes but the same **** keeps happening over and over again.
A message pops up saying "iTunes has detected an iPhone in recovery mode. You must restore this iPhone before it can be used with iTunes." So I press OK. Then I press the "Restore iPhone..." button on iTunes. It asks me if I'm sure I want to "restore it to the factory settings" and I click "Restore and Update". It then says that its "extracting software", "preparing the iphone to restore", "waiting for the iphone", then "verifying iphone restore with Apple". As this is going on the "connect to iTunes" sign is shown on the screen of the iPhone. When the "waiting for the iPhone" part starts, my screen goes black, then the apple logo pops up. The "verifying iphone restore with apple" comes on the iTunes and the status bar appears underneath the Apple logo on my phone's screen. It sits there for a couple of seconds with no progress and then the screen goes black. Then iTunes has the same **** message saying "The iPhone 'iPhone' could not be resotred. An unknown error occured (9)."
I've gone through this process countless times in the past few hours and have done everything that apple support has told me. The windows system is fully updated. So is the iTunes. I've restarted the computer. I have no idea whats wrong and its making my blood boil.
A couple of notes about the phone:
It's over a year old. It's never had water damage. It was nearing the max capacity of its internal storage. This has never happened before. I keep it in an Otter Box. I had very little problems with the phone. Lately a couple of apps like snapchat and the barstool sports app were taking a little longer to open up or would randomly close out and sometimes my camera would take a while to get going. But this problem is just ridiculous and completely rendered the phone useless.

Answer 1

Hello Sean,
It sounds like you are constantly needing to restore your phone because it keeps going into recovery mode. Usually putting a device into recovery mode and restoring it can help isolate an issue to your iPhone hardware if an issue persists afterwards. I would try manually putting it into recovery mode and restoring it 1 more time:
If you can't update or restore your iOS device
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1808
If that does not resolve it the symptoms indicate to me that it is a hardware issue causing this to happen and would seek service for it:
iPhone Repair - Other Repairs
https://www.apple.com/support/iphone/repair/other/
Thank you for using Apple Support Communities.
All the best,
Sterling