Hi everyone,
I recently got a somewhat damaged Iphone from a friend. It's main problem was/is a dead battery. The phone would not even power on with it inside so I simply removed it. Now without the battery the phone does power up when plugged in to a USB but it displays Apple logo for about 5 seconds, starts the bottom spinner and just as it starts spinning it shuts down.
Now I don't care about the data on the phone, if any and i have no idea which iOS is on the device. Trying to restore the device in Itunes produces several 16xx errors and no mater what ipsw I try the procedure looks like this.
I put the device in restore mode or DFU mode and just hitting the restore button or selecting ipsw always goes like this: preparing iphone for restore; iphone reboots and just as it should start working on something (the spinner thing near bottom of screen) it power off.

Now I tried loads of things iRecovery to set the auto-boot to true, b33jsn0w ddc hacked redsn0w nothing seems to work.

Is there something I could still try? Could it be the absence of battery that's screwing things up?