iPhone 4 iOS 6.1 Jailbroken - HTC animated weather lockscreen beware

[Punkrulz]

Posting here because I want to relay my horrible experience with doing this. I'm not sure with 100% certainty as to what has caused this issue, so I will post what happened here and hopefully others don't suffer from the same issue.

Due to learning about evasi0n last night, I backed up the phone, updated to 6.1, and had jailbroken it successfuly. After the backup sync was restored and PKGBackup restored most of my cydia apps, I was on my way... until an hour ago.

I'm a user of biteSMS. I had noticed that it acts a tad bit funky on the lock screen after receiving a message (nothing major). I decided that since I have the HTC Animated Weather Lockscreen that I would disable that in order to try and troubleshoot biteSMS. Upon the "respring" (in Winterboard), the phone actually rebooted and has been stuck there where it went even further downhill.

I attempted the hard reset (power + home button) numerous times, and this didn't resolve anything.
I also attempted the "load safe mode" option (volume up while Apple logo is on screen), however it didn't ever get passed that and was still doing the reboot loop.

Since I wasn't making any headway I decided I would just give in and try to restore the phone. I /was/ able to successfuly enter the phone into DFU mode which was then detected by iTunes, however the restore failed twice for unknown reasons. Since then the phone doesn't turn on at all. Hard resets don't do anything, no Apple logo shows up, it's sufficiently dead.

I'm wondering if it's somehow stuck in DFU mode but I can't get it out at all, and I'm not sure how I could. I'm about to resign to the fact that it's dead and might as well switch to Android as I was intending on doing so anyways. I hope you guys don't run into this same issue as me and perhaps this post will help others avoid dire circumstances.

 

[Punkrulz]

Update: Since best buy lied about their protection plan that I was suckered into buying, they had to send out the phone and I will receive a replacement in a few days. I'm surprised that I was able to brick my phone despite the jailbreak protection against that. Unfortunately I am petrified to try and jailbreak again so I don't know what I'm going to do...

 

[Europa]

Do you remember what the iTunes error codes were? They are very important in troubleshooting this type of problem.

 

[Punkrulz]

Europa,

After checking my browser history I believe it was Error #1601. iTunes took me to this page:

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1275

After that error message (and while phone was still in DFU), I rebooted the computer since I've had problems with iTunes before wanting to do updates and restores. Once the computer booted back up I wasn't able to do anything with the iPhone, no Apple logo. Hard reboots did nothing, it was like it was completely dead. It wasn't the battery as I had 80% battery life when the issue began happening.

 

[snowtrooper1966]

Wonder if using TinyUmbrella to kick it out of recovery mode would have worked....

 

[Punkrulz]

Snowtrooper,

I had tried that but unfortunately it wasn't being picked up by the computer at this point anymore. Tiny Umbrella was not detecting any device connected and thus gave me no options to be able to kick it out of DFU mode.

 

[snowtrooper1966]

A moot point since u returned the device, but was just curious since u tried and listed everything else above.
You sure you had a good cable, as you said "any device" was not connecting?

 

[fijiman]

Punkrulz .....Your problem first started by blindly running PKGbackup....installing apps/tweaks/ that work well on 5.x.x but are untested/non-working on 6.1....

 

[Punkrulz]

Fijiman you are absolutely correct. I was in such a rush to get it done that I hadn't considered that. Snowtrooper, the cable was good. The device stopped being recognized after it wouldn't even take me to the Apple logo anymore. The restore through DFU mode failed twice which what prompted me to reboot my computer since iTunes can somewhat be fickle for me.

Edit: I also didn't think anything I had on would have been a problem because the jailbreak worked that night and during the day. It was only after I decided to disable my lockscreen wallpaper that it failed, so at least until then I thought I was good to go. The only thing I recall re-adding since then was just a flashlight app that toggled activator to activate it on double clicking the lock button.

 

[Europa]

Punkrulz .....Your problem first started by blindly running PKGbackup....installing apps/tweaks/ that work well on 5.x.x but are untested/non-working on 6.1....

I couldn't agree with this more. I know a lot of people are a fan of PackageBackup, but there is no way I'd reinstall all of my 5.x packages on a device that's running 6.x, especially on a brand new jailbreak. I think PackageBackup is more trouble than it's worth and a disaster waiting to happen under these circumstances.

 

[snowtrooper1966]

I'd agree here as we'll.
I was a big proponent of PkgBackup, but over time have grown away from it.
Too many times either I have mismanaged it or it was not working properly.
I think all the times I have restored, it worked once.
I'm now a firm believer in slowly introducing favorite tweaks onto Cydia when a major JB is released.

 

[Punkrulz]

You guys are definitely right and this was a learning experience for me. After getting my iPhone back from Best Buy (And them trying to screw me over some more), I decided that I was going to jailbreak again.

I will say that I'm still absolutely petrified about it... I only installed BiteSMS (the main reason I jailbreak) because I know it's iOS 6 supported, as well as SBSettings. I'm really afraid to install anything else because a lot of the "tweaks" may not state whether or not they are iOS6 supported... Not sure if some of the other tweaks I had are in fact supported, but I'm scared to go anywhere remotely near Winterboard at this time...

 

[VOLS34]

If its not supported it usually simply won't work or puts you into safe mode. I'd only use any cydia backup if I had to have my phone replaced & planned on using the current jailbreak to restore.

 

[Napoleon PhoneApart]

I'd agree here as we'll.
I was a big proponent of PkgBackup, but over time have grown away from it.
Too many times either I have mismanaged it or it was not working properly.
I think all the times I have restored, it worked once.
I'm now a firm believer in slowly introducing favorite tweaks onto Cydia when a major JB is released.

It's definitely more work, but it's so much better as far as peace of mind goes.

 

[Punkrulz]

I'm fine with putting in more work, as stated lesson learned. I'm just terrified because I'm not sure if it was loading everything at once that bricked my phone, or if it was the weather background I was using that bricked it... but bottom line it was definitely bricked and I'm going to be terrified to install things w/o knowing they're supported by iOS6.

It wouldn't have been as bad as long as I didn't brick it and the safety measures worked, but they didn't so I don't know if it will happen again...

 

[Europa]

I'm fine with putting in more work, as stated lesson learned. I'm just terrified because I'm not sure if it was loading everything at once that bricked my phone, or if it was the weather background I was using that bricked it... but bottom line it was definitely bricked and I'm going to be terrified to install things w/o knowing they're supported by iOS6.

It wouldn't have been as bad as long as I didn't brick it and the safety measures worked, but they didn't so I don't know if it will happen again...

I wouldn't say it was bricked. There are a lot of troubleshooting steps for 16xx errors on jailbroken devices. Apple's website doesn't include all of them.

 

[snowtrooper1966]

You can slowly load tweaks, one at a time and run it for a day or so to make sure there are not conflicts....

 

[Punkrulz]

Snow it's just a matter of getting comfortable with doing so. Europa, the reason I'm saying it was bricked was because the error 1601 only occurred twice. This was while I was still able to try to boot the phone and get the Apple logo. I was still able to place it into DFU mode at this point.

After the second 1601 error in iTunes, I decided to reboot my computer just hoping it would work out the kinks. The phone was still in DFU mode at this point. Since doing so, I was no longer able to reboot the phone at all and there was no Apple logo nor screen activity at all. It appeared to be completely dead, even though I had more than 75% battery left when I was working on the phone. At this point it was also no longer being detected by the computer at all. Since I wasn't able to do anything at all with it, this is why I believe it to have been completely bricked.

 

[Europa]

Did you try using another computer?

 

[EverythingApple]

I couldn't agree with this more. I know a lot of people are a fan of PackageBackup, but there is no way I'd reinstall all of my 5.x packages on a device that's running 6.x, especially on a brand new jailbreak. I think PackageBackup is more trouble than it's worth and a disaster waiting to happen under these circumstances.

What do you recommend in place of PkgBackup? AptBackup? I know it's just a list of the apps but I guess I could pick and choose which to install if not iOS compatible.