Adventures in unlocking the iPhone up to 1.1.3

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Saturday, 23 February 2008 10:18

Your IT - Mobility

One of the things the i.unlock.no site talks about is a patch that allows you to use Nate True’s iBrickr application to easily transfer files to and from the iPhone, and install programs.

Installing programs with iBrickr isn’t necessary as the ‘Installer.app’ software is included by ZiPhone. But I remembered using iBrickr to transfer some files across and wanted to give it a go.

I added i.unlock.no into the Installer.app sources, refreshed the sources then and downloaded a fix in the ‘Unlocking Tools’ category that would let iBrickr work with a 1.1.3 phone, or so it said.

However when I tried running iBrickr, it told me that it still needed to ‘unlock my phone’. Without thinking too much, I clicked this button. I should have realised something was wrong at this point – the patch I’d downloaded was supposed to let iBrickr know that my iPhone was already unlocked.

But – I’d pressed the button, and suddenly, my iPhone showed the ‘dock connenctor’ pointing to iTunes, first with a blue background, then with a green one.

After waiting a few minutes, I closed iBrickr, ran it again and was told that it appeared my phone was in restore mode and I could click a button to restart the phone.

This I did – only to find my iPhone now in an endless reboot loop with white text streaming down the screen, and the process re-starting over and over. So, I’d advise you don’t try and run iBrickr with a 1.1.3 iPhone, even if it’s supposed to work, although what happened next shows there is a way out of this problem.

Update: I realised what I'd forgotten to do was to re-start my iPhone before trying iBrickr. I've since tried it again, turning the iPhone off completely and then turning it on again, and iBrickr worked just fine, although I only used it to transfer files to and from the iPhone.

Still, at the time, I was in trouble, so with a lump in my throat, thinking I’d maybe bricked my iPhone, I did a search on Google along the lines of ‘white text endless reboot iPhone’ – and found iPhone Alley’s site that explained that all I needed to do was to put the phone into restore mode, which meant turning the iPhone off, then holding down the ‘home’ key – the one button underneath the iPhone screen, and then turning the iPhone back on.

What happened next? Please read onto page 4.