iPod blog :: iPodosphere.com

Apparently, Apple is anything but unforgiving to the many people who are happily unlocking their iPhones all over the world. Ever since the release of the 1.1.1 firmware, countless reports of bricked iPhones have been popping up.

No worries, though. Some ingenious people at the Hakintosh forums have detailed a few steps on how to unbrick those unfortunate victim’s phones. It basically runs around the concept of downgrading the firmware back to the previous 1.0.2.

However, don’t expect your iPhone to be totally up and running despite the fix - while WiFi and third party apps will be restored once again, there’s still no way to dial outside calls. As always, take care when trying to unbrick your iPhones.

Anyway, here are the steps on how to fix those poor little iPhones:

• Make sure you have a copy of the 1.0.2 firmware
• Reboot iPhone holding the top button (power) and the home buttons.
• Release the top button 10 seconds after that, right after the screen goes dark. But keep the home (bottom) pressed for a while.
• The iPhone screen will appear to be off. Now start iTunes manually.
• iTunes will tell you it has found an iPhone in “restore mode.”
• Press option key and then click the restore button.
• Select the 1.0.2 firmware .ipsw file
• The phone will restart and there will be an error out at the end. Don’t worry. It was bound to happen (if the iPhone returns to Restore Mode instead of Activation Mode, then you may have to restore the 1.1.1 firmware, wipe all information in the iPhone and then repeat from above. But first, try to restart the iPhone.)
• Shutdown iTunes.
• Launch the latest iNDpendence (Mac-only for now.)
• Activate the phone using a expanded 1.0.2 file (to do that, make a copy of the 1.0.2 ipsw file, then select “Open with…” from the Finder’s action menu and use BOMArchiveHelper.app (it will appear in the menu.) The ipsw are really .zip files.
• It will flash all sorts of errors, but don’t worry.
• Activate the phone.
• It will show the SIM error but now the iPhone will work again with your Wi-Fi and your apps

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