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.

Create and backup a list of all your Cydia installed packages:

(1) Login via SSH into your iPhone (check old posts to know how to do that)

(2) Create a list of all your via Cydia installed packages by using this command:
dpkg -l | grep ^ii | awk '{print $2}' > /private/var/mobile/Media/installed.txt

(3) Copy the file “installed.txt” to your computer using SFTP or e.g. DiskAid.

Thats it. Now you can safely resotre or upgrade you phone. Make sure, Cydia is installed by using QuckPwn or PwnageTool.

Re-install all packages:

(1) Make sure you install OpenSSH with Cydia. Open Cydia, search for the OpenSSH package and install it. Then install all Repositories you had installed before: Open Cydia, go to “Sections” and open up “Repositories” and choose all you used before. Otherwise Cydia will not find all packages to restore.

(2) Copy the file “installed.txt” back to your device using using SFTP or DiskAid.

(3) Login into your iPhone using root:

ssh -l root (IP-number of your iPhone)

(4) This was edited and updated, so only new packages will be installed. Enter:
dpkg -l | grep ^ii | awk '{print $2}' > /private/var/mobile/Media/installed-new.txt
then
diff /private/var/mobile/Media/installed-new.txt /private/var/mobile/Media/installed.txt | grep ^\> | awk '{print $2}' > /private/var/mobile/Media/installed-todo.txt
then
apt-get install `cat /private/var/mobile/Media/installed-todo.txt`

(5) You will not see all installed applications, because the iPhone did not re-spring. So the easiest solution would be a “reboot” –> reboot now!

That should be all

iTunes will not backup all neccessary files. And even if it did backup your specific file, it is not that easy to get the specic file out of an iTunes backup. (I will give you a post how to extract files from iTunes backup files tomorrow.)

So my advice is to copy all files from your iPhone to your computer. Its quite simple!

You need a backup directory on your computer, i used “iPhone-Backup” in my home directory for this example.

(1) Make sure your computer and your iPhone are connected to the same WiFi network and you know the bonjour name or the IP-address of your iPhone.

(2) Make sure the iPhone auto-lock is set to off: Go to the iPhone “Settings”: Then to “General”, then “Auto-Lock” and choose “Never”. You can change this after backup but now you want to make sure the WiFi connection stays on while the backup runs.

(3) Open the Terminal.app on your computer

(4) Make sure you got the backup directory in your home folder already set up. If not, just type: mkdir ~/iPhone-Backup

(5) For the backup (and for all subsequent backups later) type in: rsync --exclude private/var/mobile/Media/iTunes_Control/ -av root@(your-iPhone-IP):/ ~/iPhone-Backup/ --delete

So if your iPhone address is 10.0.1.3 the command would look like this: rsync --exclude private/var/mobile/Media/iTunes_Control/ -av root@10.0.1.3:/ ~/iPhone-Backup/ --delete

Now you got to wait a little. An iPhone running on firmware 2.x will probably take a few minutes for the first backup. Without applications the copy folder should be about 600 MB.

What does the command actually do?

(a) rsync will copy files via SSH from the SSH-server account root folder (root@10.0.1.3:/) to the local folder (~/iPhone-Backup/) that are not already copied. So the first backup will take quite a long time, all next backups will only copy new or changed files.

(b) the copy will exclude all files in your iPhones “iTunes Media” folder. (actually all files starting with private/var/mobile/Media/iTunes_Control/) This is neccessary since all your synced music and fotos from iTunes are stored here. Otherwise you would get a backup of all this data already stored in your iTunes!

(c) The “--delete” tag at the end makes sure all files already backup up and not on the iPhone anymore will be deleted with the next backup. So if you delete e.g. some camera pictures on your iPhone, the backup pictures on your computer will be deleted as well with the next backup.

(d) The “-av” tag specifies the backup mode: Archiving (a) and verbose (v). In verbose mode you get a long list of files that were backup up. There will be some files that cannot be backed up: Some of them are only links to devices on the phone. And some are part of running processes on the iPhone, e.g. your temporary mail file. Do not worry too much about them. You could change “-av” to “-a” and avoid the long list at all after your backup is set up correctly.

A little correction:

The Photo database will be copied: It is in ~/Media/Photos/ So the correct syntax for not copying the photo database would be: rsync --exclude private/var/mobile/Media/Photos/ --exclude private/var/mobile/Media/iTunes_Control/ -av root@10.0.1.3:/ ~/iPhone-Backup/ --delete

Hint: You can exclude any other folders – as long as you add an --exclude before any of them. Listing them after the --exclude command (space or comma separated) will not work!

Something like:

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
@ WARNING: POSSIBLE DNS SPOOFING DETECTED! @
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

The RSA host key for xxx.local has changed,
and the key for the according IP address xxxx
is unchanged. This could either mean that
DNS SPOOFING is happening or the IP address for the host
and its host key have changed at the same time.
Offending key for IP in /Users/admin/.ssh/known_hosts:x
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
@ WARNING: REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED! @
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
IT IS POSSIBLE THAT SOMEONE IS DOING SOMETHING NASTY!
Someone could be eavesdropping on you right now (man-in-the-middle attack)!
It is also possible that the RSA host key has just been changed.
The fingerprint for the RSA key sent by the remote host is
xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx.
Please contact your system administrator.
Add correct host key in /Users/admin/.ssh/known_hosts to get rid of this message.
Offending key in /Users/admin/.ssh/known_hosts:x
RSA host key for xxx.local has changed and you have requested strict checking.
Host key verification failed.

You probably just tried to login to your iPhone using an (DHCP) WiFi IP-address that was in use by some other iPhone before. Or you try to log into your iPhone using the iPhone name (e.g. iPhone.local) instead of an IP-address.

If you are sure there is no other party on your WiFi network and no DNS spoofing possible the solution is quite easy: Just delete the known_hosts file on your host computer by typing in: rm ~/.ssh/known_hosts

I just found out a small little extra that I was never aware of: You can use the name you gave your iPhone on iTunes to login into your phone. Just add a .local to the name.

So if your iPhone name on iTunes is twiPhone, you can always reach your iPhone by using twiPhone.local instead of a cryptic IP address. This should help you al ot if you are using more than one WiFi network with your iPhone.

Remember: The name is case-sensitive! So twiPhone.local would work, twiphone.local not!

The same name will be used for Bonjour as well. Check “Bonjour Browser” and see you iPhone registered in your network with SSH and SFTP

So to connect via ssh use: ssh -l root (your-iPhone-name-goes-here).local