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!

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