I UN-Bricked My iPod Touch
After a successful jailbreak, my iPod Touch was effectively bricked. It would work normally for several seconds, and then pause, and return to the home page, displaying an informative message about how to make the icons wiggle so that I could rearrange them.
Nothing I did would make it stop, and it wouldn’t connect to iTunes. Utterly useless.
But:
None of these disasters affected the ssh daemon, or the WiFi. I was able to establish a ssh connection, immediately, with my shiny new root password, via the swell radio.
I don’t know many UNIX commands, so picking a favorite one is easy: it’s “top”. This command shows you the top ten or so processes in your brain, every second or two, in an attractive text-mode display. I found out that an application called “Springboard” was crashing, and restarting, over and over.
I eventually learned that Springboard is the application launcher, and that it apparently expects the root password to be “alpine”.
Astonishing.
Well, that’s easy to fix. I set the password back to “alpine”… No joy. I rebooted it repeatedly (you can just type “reboot” at the command line). Still no luck.
At this point, I was getting pretty disturbed.
Finally I found a blog post from a dude named Dave Smith.
Dave ’splains, quite cogently, that that I needed to get the iPod into “DFU mode.” “DFU”? I would have called “BFU.” Whatever. This is a state that will indicatse to iTunes that there is a bricked iPod that needs to be restored.
To do this, I needed to make Springboard quit. I found the application, at /System/Library/CoreServices/Springboard.app and renamed it to SpringBoard.BiteMe.
I rebooted, and the machine never got past the apple logo.
I plagiarize herewith from Dave, who’s a pretty good writer, and explains how to put the little machine into the holy BFU mode:
- Turn on your iPod (in my case it would only get as far as displaying the Apple logo
- Hold the power and home buttons down (the iPod will power off after 10 seconds, but keep holding those buttons down)
- After the iPod powers off, release the power button (but keep holding the home button down
After a few more seconds, the Mac announced that it had connected to a BFU’d iPod.
“Excuse me,” intoned the Mac. “Your iPod is BFU’d, and so are you.” (Or words to that effect.) I released the home button.
iTunes restored the machine to its original state. Nothing was lost, except for my swell HP calculators.
I intend to re-jailbreak it immediately.
April 20th, 2008 at 1:56 am
Thanks for these instructions. They worked!
April 20th, 2008 at 2:45 am
Hawkins, it’d probably be helpful for googlers if we could come up with the “helpful” message that pops up every time the iPod reboots. Do you recall it? I don’t.
April 21st, 2008 at 11:42 am
All I remember is the button, labeled “DISMISS.”
April 24th, 2008 at 11:30 pm
HELP! I bricked a student’s 1st gen iPod Touch… I’ve done everything I need to to get to the point where iTunes asks me if I want to restore the iPod (which I need to I guess) .. and so I clicked Restore and it did all the extracting thing, but then gave me the dreaded message:
The iPod could not be restored. An unknown error occurred (2001).
Any suggestions? I’ve got the iPod sitting with the picture of the cable pointing to the iTunes logo with an arrow between them, but nothing happens.
If I then power if off and then back on, I get all sorts of system looking stuff (can you tell I’m not a software person cuz I’ve been a Mac Addict all my life and never needed to learn that stuff) … anyway, it seems to stick on this:
BSD root: md0, major 2, minor 0 over and over again… any ideas? I will NEVER do this to another kids iPod… they’re just gonna have to do their own!
Hope you can help. Thanks
Cathy
April 25th, 2008 at 12:03 am
never mind… I just kept trying to Restore, Jailbreak, Restore, and it finally worked!! I’m not even sure what I did but it’s working!!! this kid’s on his own from this point on!!
thanks
May 2nd, 2008 at 12:02 pm
Cathy:
Bizarrely, according to this post, the solution appears to be to use iTunes in Windows to restore it.
Now, I’m as big a Mac fanboy as you’ll find, but even I think this is pretty funny.
May 20th, 2008 at 3:06 pm
Haukins,
I done potted up some bricks fer ya .
youz can halv’m ifn youz wan’m.
Letz me noz soon.
Thanc ye,
FERD
May 21st, 2008 at 1:04 am
Dear Ferd:
Yes, please. I’d like those nice bricks. Mmm. Bricks.
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