Well, guess what. Another iPhailure. I had seen some recent updates in RockApp and I was definitely skeptical about if they’d not cause problems. Apparently after today I did some research and it turns out that the updates were causing widespread problems. Serious problems.
Now I’m not talking about just making stuff crash or not work. I’m talking about full blown serious issues…not being able to boot! I would see the iPhone show the Apple logo and then about 5 seconds later it would just shut off again. Even more serious was that when I put the phone into DFU (Device Firmware Update) Mode, it would fail when trying to restore the firmware to factory settings.
It’s funny thinking about the way this all happened. It seemed so innocuous…so innocent. I was working with it just fine. Then I was prompted by somebody to enter their phone number quickly into my phone for safe-keeping. I entered it into my SBSettings Fast Notes as I do a lot of things when I want to jot something down super quick. When I thought I’d just leave the fast notes open and hit the sleep button, I didn’t realize that the darn thing would leave the on-screen keyboard up! This was a big problem….I couldn’t use the phone any longer since the stupid keyboard blocked my view of the unlock slider!
What I ended up doing made my heart sink with what happened next. I went to go shut it off….slid my finger across the screen to confirm shut-off…and waited. Then when I turned it on again, it wouldn’t boot. I got the results described above. At first it seemed I had messed it up by shutting it down with that keyboard still up…but that really doesn’t make any sense. After looking online for a solution to my problem, I found it was a huge issue due to a recent Rock update. Great…the one I had installed. The one that seemed to be working just fine. But I hadn’t actually powered the phone down and up again until this moment.
So what did I do to fix it? I tried a LOT of things. Took me a couple of hours to finally get it sorted out to where I could restore the thing. Of course restoring it was a last resort to me because I didn’t want to lose my files, and restoring all my apps and settings is a pain. I had to try everything I could find before deciding that I should just restore it.
First I remember trying to use the iH8Sn0w iREB v3.1-2 for Windows. First I thought I’d try the Recovery Boot Loop fix…which all it did after I got the libUSB installed and clicked the button for my iPhone 3G was reboot and still shut off. Then I tried the actual iREB app and clicked my 3G iPhone button, and it didn’t appear to do anything. Then I downloaded and tried iRecovery for Windows. At first I thought it failed, but then I read the README.TXT file which said it was supposed to be run from a command prompt window.
iRecovery had two options. To upload a file, or to start up a shell. So I started up a shell. The shell might have been able to do something to fix the darn thing, but I don’t know enough about doing that stuff. I had tried to use some commands that I found online:
setenv auto-boot true
saveenv
fsboot
Doing this didn’t seem to do anything, but I’m thinking it may have contributed to making the restore work. After those commands I typed in the “reboot” command and watched it reboot and then shut off. So at that point I decided to try a restore again, which also failed. Then…this might be the only thing which was necessary: I rebooted the phone into Recovery mode & was able to restore a custom firmware file to the phone. For those who don’t know… Recovery mode is entered when you boot the phone like so: press and hold both the Home button AND the sleep button for about 12-13 seconds…then while still holding the Home button, release the sleep button once the image on the screen pops up, – still hold the Home button about 10 seconds until iTunes says that there’s been an iPhone detected in recovery mode.
Also for those who don’t know, you can download a custom firmware file to your iPhone by SHIFT-CLICKING the Restore button in iTunes (that’s holding down the shift key while left-clicking).
A fair warning which many would already know if they jailbroke their iPhone, but worth mentioning: DO NOT update to the latest official Apple iPhone firmware (3.1.3). It contains no new features, and nothing was done to it that is worth updating. If you like your iPhone jailbroken as I do, then do yourself a favor and pay attention and special care to NEVER update the iPhone to that version. A friend of mine did it by accident and he cannot jailbreak his phone anymore.
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