I wrote about reparinig the “Apple screen of death” in this post. Unfortunately I did not have SSH access to my phone this time since the upgrade from 2.1 to 2.2 rendered (Cydia OpenSSH server installation not working.

Still, I knew I had to prevent “mobilewatchdog.bundle” to load (read the other post to understand why.) So this time I just deleted the files by connecting via cable. By doing this I managed to get my SpringBoard preferences working again and I quickly installed OpenSSH to get regular Terminal access to the phone and restoring the “mobilewatchdog.bundle” again.

Here are the instructions:

WARNING: If this repair fails you will have a device that will reboot every 10 to 12 minutes – until you restore the full device from scratch. So try this repair as a last chance to recover from a “endless boot” device.

Read all steps before you begin. Step 1 and 2 (and step 3 and 4 later on) have to be completed in a few minutes since your phone will probably reboot after some time.

1.) First connect your phone to the Computer via cable and switch it on. Open up the free application DiskAid and make sure your phone is found. Then quickly change the small selector at the bottom left to “Root Folder”. Use “Copy to folder” to save the folder “mobilewatchdog.bundle” at “/System/Library/SystemConfiguration/” to you Computer. You will need this folder later again!

2.) Now delete the folder “mobilewatchdog.bundle” on the device by using the “Delete from Device” button.

Basically you delete the startup of a system daemon that will check every 2-3 minutes if Springboard could be loaded. If Springboard is not loaded “mobilewatchdog” would reboot your phone. Deleting this process will prevent the system from rebooting every 2-3 minutes. Still, every 10 minutes or so the system will still reboot by another process that cannot be deleted. But this 10 minutes should be enough to get your Springboard preferences restored

3.) Reboot. Wait. If you get to your SpringBoard again (or to the PIN screen) everything went fine. If your phone reboots again after 10-12 minutes without showing anything except your Apple or Pineapple logo then this repair failed and you have to fully restore your phone. But this never happened to me so far.

4.) Hurry! On SpringBoard you should open up Cydia and install “OpenSSH” as quick as possible! The phone will certainly reboot within 10-12 minutes and you want the installation do be finished by then!

Extra: If you do not see your Cydia logo on SpringBoard but you are sure it is installed – then you quickly go to the “Settings” panel, choose “General”, “Restrictions” and enable them. Then disable them again. This should bring you all your applications back to the SpringBoard!

5.) Installation done? Check if you can login via SSH to your phone.

6.) Reboot again and copy the “mobilewatchdog.bundle” files back to their location (/System/Library/SystemConfiguration/) by using DiskAid again or by using an SFTP client and the SSH login.

7.) Make sure you login via SSH and set the correct permissions of the files! If you do not do so the phone will still reboot every 10-12 minute since “mobilewatchdog.bundle” cannot be loaded at startup of the phone! enter these 3 commands when logged into your phone:

chmod 755 /System/Library/SystemConfiguration/mobilewatchdog.bundle
chmod 755 /System/Library/SystemConfiguration/mobilewatchdog.bundle/mobilewatchdog
chmod 644 /System/Library/SystemConfiguration/mobilewatchdog.bundle/Info.plist

If the files were put on the right location there should be no error message.

8.) Reboot again.

Thats it!

Your iPhone will reboot and show the “Apple Logo” (jailbroken devices will show a pineapple) and will not start the Springboard? And – showing only the logo – the iPhone will restart sometimes by itself?

- If your device is jailbroken and you have SSH installed and enabled you could have a solution right here!

While using Firmware 2.0, 2.0.1 and 2.0.2 I had this problem quite often. Now with firmware 2.1 it happenend only once while cancelling an AppStore application install.

Solution is quite simple: If your Springboard preferences are corrupted or for some other reason not valid the Apple iPhone OS will try to re-create them. Well, the more applications you have installed (I counted 110 on my main iPhone) the more time Springboard will need to recreate them. But the iPhone OS will only allow roughly 2 minutes for this process. If its not finished within this time it will kill the process and re-start it. Endlessly!

Solution is quite simple, as long as you manage to login into your device via SSH (read my other posts how to do this):

1) Reboot your device

2) Try to connect as root into your device using WiFi and SSH as fast as possible (read my other posts how to connect via SSH)

[If you do not have WiFi enabled by default you could still try to login via iTunnel. You will need a Windows PC or Windows on VMware. ]

3) Type in

mv /System/Library/SystemConfiguration/mobilewatchdog.bundle/ /

Make sure you do not forget the last “space” & “/“!

4) Type in

reboot

The device will reboot. Actually you removed the process that will kill Springboard every 2 minutes. But now you will have another problem: After 10 minutes or so a hardware monitoring process will have a check on the running system. Since it will not find the process you just prevented from booting the hardware monitoring process will re-boot the iPhone.

Still, this 10 minutes will be considerably longer than the 2 minutes before. Just let your iPhone reboot and wait about 10 minutes. Normally SpringBoard should load after 4-5 minutes. Your preferences are valid again.

-> If your iPhone reboots after 10 minutes you got some more severe problems that cannot be fixed by this tutorial. But in my case it rebooted into SpringBoard 95% of all times.

5) As soon as you see your beloved SpringBoard again you should make sure you copy the removed process starter back to its original position. Or you iPhone will continue to reboot every 10 minutes! So login using root and type:

mv /mobilewatchdog.bundle /System/Library/SystemConfiguration/

Do not wait with this too long as the iPhone should not reboot while this command is running! To be on the safe side you could wait for another reboot, login then as fast as possible (normally roughly a minute after rebooting started) and run the command.

So, how to avoid it? Upgrade to firmware 2.1. I had no problems at all using Firmware 2.1. As long as you are careful not to install/upgrade applications from the AppStore while runnig out of battery etc.

And make sure you got your SSH login enabled all times. Otherwise you will not be able to connect to your device as long as it is in booting mode!

If you have any question, feel free to post it here.