[lans9r]

Hi

First off, I'd like to say I realise that a lot of how-tos and FAQs are available - but I kind of need to know how to proceed in these particular circumstances without my actually knowing for certain where I'm starting from... Let me explain.

Short version: I remotely-upgraded the kid's iphone 4 to ios6 without realising the previous owner had jailbroken it and I need to know how best to proceed from this not-working starting point. At the moment, we can't even activate the phone

Details:

The stepkid was telling me last night she got her cousins old iPhone 4 (might be a 4S tho) and would I show her how to put music on it etc. I connected to her laptop via Teamviewer as I wasn't at her location, fired up iTunes and noticed it was on iOS 4 offering me an iOS6 upgrade. Wow, I think, that's old, we'll soon sort that and I promptly upgraded her to iOS 6.

Phone reboots, and it won't activate. In iTunes, it says there's no SIM inserted. She's in the UK and was using an O2 sim by the way.

Trying to work out what's gone wrong - and of course I can't physically see the phone - I ask her if there was any chance the phone was jailbroken. She doesn't know. I ask her if it had a Cydia icon on it. She says it did.

Oops !

OK. So here's where I am. I don't know yet (as I haven't been round) whether it's a 4 or 4S. I've never jailbroken an iPhone but I've read lots of tutorials in the last few hours about how to jailbreak it using redsn0w and such like.

My question is: how do bestI proceed from here to get her a working phone again? If I could somehow get her activated as normal without it being jailbroken, that would be easiest for her (she doesn't really need it jailbroken). But, if her cousin was on vodaphone for example, would I somehow need to get it unlocked again? Is my best bet to somehow jailbreak it and that would include an unlock? I'm asking this as the FAQs all are for starting from a working iPhone, where you know the software installed, and the baseband - but I'm not even going to be able to get into the phone itself to find out this information at the moment.

Currently, it has 6.0.1 installed, but it's not activated. I've no way of knowing if I can unlock it or otherwise get it to work with her O2 sim. I understand 6.0.1 isn't available untethered yet, so would I be better going back to version 5 for example - tho she might be happy enough with the tethering issue for the time being, I'm sure the devs will have that one sorted out soon enough.

Am going round in a few hours, to face a very annoyed little girl... so if anyone could help me out here with a little guidance as to how best to proceed, I'd really appreciate it.

And yes.. I know I'm a **** for not wondering why the software was so old on it

Cheers!

[rdiddy_25]

Since it had iOS 4 then it was the ip4 not 4s. Only way to downgrade to another OS is if she had her shsh blobs saved prior to Apple not signing it anymore.

[lans9r]

Thanks - I've now actually got hold of the phone and it turns out it's a 3GS and not a 4 as I was told..

It's currently installed with this:
Model MC637B/A - iPhone3GS
Firmware 6.0.1
Baseband 06.15.00-6.4_M3S2

I've been reading all evening, and went down the route of trying to boot it tethered with the IOS6 IPSW and redsn0w - but I get a missing keys.plist for this build.

It also seems that it's pretty common that in fact a lot of people have upgraded to iOS6 on a 3GS that was previously unlocked and are now getting this message. It seems to me that that's the real fault here, so I'm looking into hacktivation to see if I can to it that way. Not having much luck so far tho !

Any further clues given the above info ?

Thanks for the help so far

[Massie]

Looks like someone installed an iPad baseband on it so they could unlock it. Unfortunately that means the only way to restore is by building a custom ipsw file; google is your friend but I believe you can do it all in redsn0w these days.