Hardik Shah - Trying to be with the Technology

It's Sunday morning, 9th of December 2007, and in comes the call at 0800 hrs of a friend who recently got an iPhone from US. I had promised her to activate and sim break it as a birthday gift (Her birthday was last week). I was wondering - on a Sunday you gotta sleep till 12 noon rather than leaving for Andheri and cracking up the phone :).

I got up - 8:15 was the time and took a public transport to her office, which had WiFi Connectivity. That's the first thing that you will need before you jail break the iPhone. A WiFi connection (non-encrypted, unsecured) is required in the process of jailbreaking and unlocking the iPhone.

So there I was at her office and ready to hack into the iPhone, activate it and give her an awesome birthday gift. We got ready to unlock - a coffee & a coke as our only refreshments - and an awesome WiFi connection. Mind you - the phone was pre-installed with ver 1.1.1 of the firmware and it was upgraded to ver 1.1.2 by the seller. The crack is not possible if you have the newer iPhones which come pre-installed with ver 1.1.2

I stated up my Vista, installed iTunes (yes - you need to download a 51.08 MB of crap) and connected the iPhone to it. The idea was to first downgrade the firmware to 1.1.1 and then jailbreak in. We downloaded the ver 1.1.1 of the firmware on our local machine, got into the Apple Recovery mode (turn off the iPhone, Hold the Power button & the home button, release the power button after 10 seconds and you will enter into the recovery mode). Once in recovery mode, iTunes detected it and asks us to restore it to the latest version of the firmware - in our case it was 1.1.2 - however we did not want to do that. We had to manually select the downloaded firmware by holding the "Shift" key on our machine and then hitting the restore button - where it will displayed a "Windows explorer" type window. The firmware was highlighted - which was just downloaded and the restore process progressed (it just took about 10-15 mins). At the end of the restore we got an error (1015), and just as mentioned on forums, ignored it.

Now came the most crucial part of Jail Breaking into the phone. We had to search for "iPhuc for Windows" to get out of the recovery mode. Once installed on the system, shot three commands to get it out of recovery mode:

cmd setenv auto-boot true
cmd saveenv
cmd fsboot

A wait for 20 seconds and we were able to see the screen which says "Slide for Emergency" We were now ready to JailBreak the iPhone. Then followed the coolest and sexiest part of jailbreaking. We followed the process till Step 9 and the phone restarted - however to our surprise it went automatically into the Recovery mode :(.

After a lot of R&D, and searching onto other forums, upgrading to 1.1.2, and again downgrading it to 1.1.1, we still would get stuck up on the same screen. There was a moment in doing this when the Phone just didn't respond for couple of mins and our heart were in our mouth (I was just praying that I didn't iBrick the phone - it would have been the worst ever birthday gift to anyone then). However - I was lucky and the phone rebooted after a wait of 5 mins.

I later realized the mistake I was doing when downgrading the iPhone to ver 1.1.1. When you downgrade the phone, only the firmware get downgraded. It was also necessary to downgrade the "BaseBand"firmware as well. Hence I followed steps mentioned here under section "Downgrade the baseband firmware". Once the baseband was downgraded, we had to restore the firmware to 1.1.1 and follow the steps of "JailBreaking" mentioned here. This time the screen changed to "Slide to Unlock" rather than "Slide for Emergency" (This is when I said to myself - the phone is about to get SimUnlocked - and the birthday treat would be awesome).

Then followed a series of simple steps right from installing the AnySIM application to doing all the patches. It was all unlocked and activated ready to use in under 15 mins :).

And finally the iPhone springboard came up without any glitches