the iphone dev team just released the new pwnage tool 4.1 for jailbreaking and unlocking ios 4.1 for the iphone, ipod touch, and ipad. i've been waiting on it for a while since my iphone 3g was already on ios 4.0 when it was handed over to me. and as many others have experienced, ios 4.0 on the iphone 3g is slow...really slow. included in ios 4.1 is a fix to cure the iphone 3g of is sluggishness. apple released ios 4.1 a couple of months back but i could not upgrade right away to ios 4.1. doing so without the ability to unlock it would mean that i could not use it on t-mobile.
well, the wait is over. as always, the way the pwnage tool works is by creating a custom firmware from the official one that itunes uses to ugrade your phone. once you have pwnage open, you point it toward the downloaded firmware file from apple. you make a few selections as to the type of device you have, the unlock option, and software that you might want to install along with the cydia package. a few minutes later, it spits out a file that you should be using to upgrade your phone. at the end, it asks if you have jailbroken your phone previously. if so, you could just fire up itunes, option-click the restore button on itunes and point it to your custom firmware. if the phone is not currently jailbroken, it helps you put your phone into a mode called "dfu" (essentially recovery mode) so that itunes will accept putting the custom firmware onto your phone. there is a message that says if you are unsure, then you should say that it is not currently jailbroken and go through this extra step.
well, since i've been using it on t-mobile, i know that it has been jailbroken. so i opted to just bypass this next step and jump right into using itunes to upgrade my phone. let me tell you that this was a HUGE mistake. after working for what seems to be forever, it quits and tells me that error 1603 has occured. not only that, the iphone kept on displaying the spinning wheel without letting up, indicating that it was still working. by this time, the spinning wheel is now called the spinning wheel of death. i had to force a shut down by simultaneously holding down the home and power buttons until the screen went blank. upon powering it back on, it was introduced to the "connect to itunes" graphic. so i connected to itunes and it finds the phone. it says that it has to be restored before it can be used. so i do the option-click thing and pointed to the custom firmware file i created. and again, after a long while, it errors out.
i went online and did some research, tried all suggested fixes, but nothing worked. by this time, i was on my 4th or 5th try, and still getting nowhere. i thought that i had a dead phone. the last piece of advice i got from researching was to restore back to version 4.0 and attempt the upgrade once again. luckily, i kept the custom firmware i created for version 4.0. and i'm not sure if this mattered or not, but another piece of advice was to do the upgrade using a different user account. i tried the combination of the two and it worked. but it only worked to put me back to where i was before...on ios 4.0.
after getting my phone to boot on ios 4.0 again, i went back to my original user account and used the pwnage tool to put the phone into dfu mode. then i option-clicked restored once again and pointed to the newly custom 4.1 file again. this time, it worked. in about 20 minutes, the phone was on ios 4.1. it took another half hour to load everything from a backup onto the phone. after that, i went into the cydia app and installed the ultrasn0w unlock utility so that i could use the phone on t-mobile again. what should have taken about an hour to accomplish took me 4 hours.
so my learning in this was that you should ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS use the pwnage tool to put your phone into dfu mode, even when it says that previously jailbroken devices do not have to go through that step.
now my phone is running much faster. no more waiting 2 seconds after i make an entry for it to take effect.
one last thing. always backup by forcing a sync before you attempt to upgrade. you don't want to have to re-enter all your contacts and calendar events from scratch. oh, and i did this on a mac. as of this day, the windows version of pwnage tool 4.1 is not yet available.
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