Originally posted June 28, 2009

I have the old 8gb original iphone that my brother bought a few years ago. It’s in my care because it appeared to be broken. I have this feeling that it might not really be broken, so I’m giving it a go at trying to bring it back to life. First step was to put it in DFU mode, which is done by:

  1. Turn off
  2. Hold the power and home buttons at the same time
  3. When see Apple, let go of power, but keep holding home
  4. When see cable icon pointing to itunes icon, you are in DFU mode

At this point, the iphone appears in itunes and I can upgrade it.

Interestingly, it took about 30 minutes for the iphone software update to download, as it was around 245MB. During this time, the iphone did not stay in DFU mode, but somehow reboot itself. I just repeated the steps to put it back in DFU mode.

It took a while, but after downloading and updating, I had what appeared to me to be a brand-new iphone. I set it up as My iPhone and things looked ok.

I then downloaded QuickPwn, using the torrent file from here:

http://blog.iphone-dev.org/post/74278878/close-the-stable-door

I ran the program and let it do it’s thing. As far as I can tell, everything works fine. Now I just need a valid sim card to try it out.

I then used Cydia to install openSSH. I didn’t get any errors. So I opened a terminal on my laptop and entered:

ssh [email protected]

After quite a long while, I was prompted to accept the host key and could enter the password alpine. It worked perfectly.

maryh$ ssh [email protected]
The authenticity of host ‘10.0.1.195 (10.0.1.195)’ can’t be established.
RSA key fingerprint is f2:20:b6:5a:b2:cc:7c:12:a4:29:62:03:40:e4:1b:d3.
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)? yes
Warning: Permanently added ‘10.0.1.195’ (RSA) to the list of known hosts.
[email protected]’s password:
localhost:~ root# df -H
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/disk0s1 525M 471M 49M 91% /
devfs 27k 27k 0 100% /dev
/dev/disk0s2 7.6G 84M 7.6G 2% /private/var

Now I just need a valid sim card to test this out.