a real challenge for ya! HELP from Mexico

[3shari3]

A good pal gave me his old Iphone 3GS with his AT&T chip in it. I fell in love with it and started using it with WIFI. I wanted to put my local Telcel chip in the phone so I took it to a technician who charged me $50 to unlock the phone. It seemed to work but I couldnt download Viber without updating to ios4.1 I think it was so I went into iTunes and upgraded my iTunes then synced the phone with a Telcel chip in it to update the phone and it screwed it all up. All I get now is a message saying there is no chip in the phone although the chip is in it.

I tried several forums etc. and tried the restore mode in iTunes but get the same message of no SIM card. What can I do now...will something else like tinyumbrella work for this problem? should I put the original AT&T chip back in it to try other fixes? HELP from Mexico...por favor!

I wonder if my Telcel chip wont cut it due to capacity or something...it says it is 128 KB

 

[kch50428]

The tech gave you a 'software unlock' for that $50... The good pal needs to contact AT&T and have the phone unlocked by them - once that is done, you should be able to use your Telecel sim.

 

[3shari3]

thanks for your quick reply...I imagine he did that because after I paid the technician and put my Telcel card in, it worked pretty well...what screwed it up was trying to download the Itunes updates and update the system to iOS4.1 so I could download Viber...what I get is the setup screen asking me for language and country, then I connect to the internet and receive a message saying the phone could not be activated because the activation server is temporarily unavailable. Try connecting to iTunes to activate it and when I do that and try to restore it, i get a message saying there is no SIM card inserted...but there is.
Do I need to jailbreak it? throw it into the ocean? I've been trying really hard to figure out what to do to fix the problem...i downloaded tinyumbrella and snow and cant figure out how to do it....any help would be really appreciated...to the person who gets me back into my phone I will give a free night at our oceanfront Inn in Baja!!!!! how's that for an incentive to help a poor damsel in iPhone distress?

 

[youngnicol]

Most likely when your phone was unlocked (unofficially by jailbreak) the guy put baseband 6.15 on it, when you then try to update via itunes the phone knows it's been tampered with and locks up, you need to downgrade the baseband to 5.13 or very near. I would take it back to the guy who unlocked it for you and ask him to unjailbreak it for you! I have a friend who does this for people but he always warns them they cannot update on itunes as you should have been told also.

 

[iDonev]

Most likely when your phone was unlocked (unofficially by jailbreak) the guy put baseband 6.15 on it, when you then try to update via itunes the phone knows it's been tampered with and locks up, you need to downgrade the baseband to 5.13 or very near. I would take it back to the guy who unlocked it for you and ask him to unjailbreak it for you! I have a friend who does this for people but he always warns them they cannot update on itunes as you should have been told also.

If the phone has the iPad baseband, iTunes should've thrown an error thus preventing the update.

3shari3, either take it to the shop and explain what you did or contant forum member UnlockStreak. He can give you a permanent unlock.