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.