How to reset my jailbroken iPhone?

September 11, 2014 2:24 AM

I have a jailbroken iPhone 5s that iTunes will not recognize.

The phone is running iOS 7.1. I have an iMac with 10.9.4 Leopard, and a PC laptop running Windows 7.

I jailbroke the phone several months ago with no problems. The other day I was transferring some new apps to the iPhone, but, suddenly needing to leave the house, I pulled it from the USB cord while still syncing. I didn't notice any problem for a while, until I tried to connect it to iTunes.

iTunes will NOT recognize the phone. On the left panel, under "Devices," when I connect the USB, it will say "zardoz's..." but it's greyed out, and the little greyed out circle spins around to the right of that. Usually that happens for just a second or two but this time it's permanent.

On top of that, just today, my App Store icon disappeared! No idea why.

I rebooted, both the phone and the computer, no change. I updated iTunes to the latest version, no change. I'm ready to de-jailbreak, but in order to do that iTunes needs to recognize the phone, which it won't do. I tried to re-jailbreak (with the Pangu jailbreak app), and that did nothing; it can't see the iPhone either.

I also have a PC at work, and tried the same things, but no go. So it's most certainly not an iTunes problem, but a problem with the phone. My only guess is resetting the jailbreak--maybe through Cydia?--but don't know how to go about that.

The only thing I can think of is returning the phone to its factory settings, which doesn't sound too appealing. Or is there something else I'm missing?

posted by zardoz to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

Best answer: if you do the "erase all content and settings" on a jailbroken phone, it will fuck itself to pieces and "brick". I'm assuming this is what you mean by a factory reset.

This isn't the same as bricking on most phones, you can just restore... but still, yea, don't do that.

What you want here is DFU mode. Yea, you're essentially doing a "format" here, but that's what you want. Make an icloud backup on the phone, start in DFU mode(i forget if that wiki mentions it, but you have to start that process WITH the cable connected and the phone connected to the computer), restore, then re-jailbreak and restore your backup.

You shouldn't have to do much config at all. In my experience even jailbroken apps settings get saved.

On top of that, just today, my App Store icon disappeared! No idea why.

I think as a general rule we don't really discuss piracy on the green, but did you have a pirate appstore installed? because issues like this can be caused by that. If not well then, that pull while syncing really caused some corruption. I've seen general weirdness from that before and it wouldn't surprise me, but read into that post if you did have something like what i described installed.

One of my favorite things about iphones compared to a lot of other smartphones that have come and gone is that you basically can NOT brick one(barring stuff like baseband flashing people used to do on older iphones). There isn't really a corner like this you can paint yourself into that you can just DFU your way out of. The only time that becomes an issue is if you have a non current jailbroken version of the OS, and the current version that's out isn't capable of being jailbroken... and then you lose your jailbreak. But we still have about another week of grace period here with ios 7 being fully wide open, and ios 8 not out yet. So format like the wind!
posted by emptythought at 3:58 AM on September 11, 2014 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: emptythought, you saved my bacon. DFU was indeed what I needed, and the phone is restoring as I type. As for that other matter...well, yes, guilty as charged; I'll have to be more circumspect if I try those shenanigans again.
posted by zardoz at 5:38 AM on September 11, 2014