iPhone 3GS = iBrick

[theITguy]

Hi all, I am theITguy to put it simply I am a computer guru and I love tinkering and tweaking things when I have the time. So I got a spare iPhone and jailbroke it, the story and aftermath is below.

I need some iHelp! I used the greenpois0n untethered jailbreak on my 3GS running iOS 4.2.1 It worked fine for a couple days.

However, I turned it off for the night with the battery somewhere near 75% I wake up and power up my iPhone, it is doing a spinning gear on the greenpois0n boot logo.

I have tried restoring back to the factory apple iOS and using the TinyUmbrella SHSH blob restore function. Nada, now I have the apple boot logo with the spinning gear.

I have lost count how many times I've restored/ran jailbreaks on this phone.

This is just a visual example/reference of what is wrong with my iPhone- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iO9rGnWmVvc

I should also note that time it takes to reach the gear is starting to get longer...

Any help, insights, or voodoo magic will be appreciated.
I did all my jailbreaks on my MacBook Pro running SL 10.6.6

[Orby]

Have you tried manually rebooting it (holding down home and power until the screen goes black and turns on again)?

Tried entering DFU at all in this state and restoring then re-running the jailbreak?

Let the battery run dead (or opened your phone and manually disconnected it, NOT RECOMMENDED UNLESS YOU KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING) and then try the restore?

Start with those three things, in order. Most likely, it was a bad Cydia tweak or something that threw you into this bootloop... what were you doing immediately before this loop hit you?

[theITguy]

Have you tried manually rebooting it (holding down home and power until the screen goes black and turns on again)?

Tried entering DFU at all in this state and restoring then re-running the jailbreak?

I've manually rebooted many times and I've memorized the steps to put an iPhone into DFU.
I have lost count how many times I've restored/ran jailbreaks on this phone... I think its about 15 restores+jailbreaks now.

I have not done running the battery till it's dead, I wasn't sure if that was a good idea or not.

Question, where to the SHSH blobs come into play? Is there another way to get them back on my iPhone?

Also, if I run the jailbreak again and add the SSH package, will I be able to SSH into my tethered iPhone from my mac?

What were you doing immediately before this loop hit you?
I was sleeping because I had turned the phone off for the night.

[Orby]

Have you tried manually rebooting it (holding down home and power until the screen goes black and turns on again)?

Tried entering DFU at all in this state and restoring then re-running the jailbreak?

I've manually rebooted many times and I've memorized the steps to put an iPhone into DFU.
I have lost count how many times I've restored/ran jailbreaks on this phone... I think its about 15 restores+jailbreaks now.

I have not done running the battery till it's dead, I wasn't sure if that was a good idea or not.

Question, where to the SHSH blobs come into play? Is there another way to get them back on my iPhone?

Also, if I run the jailbreak again and add the SSH package, will I be able to SSH into my tethered iPhone from my mac?

What were you doing immediately before this loop hit you?
I was sleeping because I had turned the phone off for the night.

The SHSH blobs only determine what version of iOS you can restore to, when you get to a place where you can restore the firmware.

Actually, I just thought about something: do you have SSH installed on your device at the moment? If so, you can try SSHing in as root and sending a reboot command that way.

As for the "what were you doing immediately before" thing, I was hoping there'd be an easy answer, like "installed xxx package in Cydia..." ah well.

If the SSH reboot isn't working, then letting the battery drain fully is about the last thing I can suggest (if you can't enter DFU, that means faulty hardware or drivers, more likely drivers, which are reloaded when the circuit loses all power) short of a hardware replacement.