Jailbreak iOS4 for spirit

Apologies to my normal viewers but I wanted to add this post here specifically for people who, like me, jailbroke their iphone using spirit and now are waiting to update to the new iOS 4.

If what I write below means nothing to you or you are not gungho about this stuff then don't think about trying this. What's the worst that could happen? For a wee while tonight I had lost all of my contacts. You could break your phone and no-one will fix it because you were trying to do something that the waranty doesn't allow. More likely you'll have to restore your phone and loose youre old jailbreak. Or...

it could work. Just don't blame me if it doesn't.

I have an iPhone 3G. It has 8GB memory. Prior to this it was running OS 3.13 with iTunes 9.2 and it was jailbroken (but not unlocked) using spirit. It had never been jailbreaked prior to spirit. It looked like the screenshot and I was happy.

I wanted to upgrade to iOS 4 but was waiting for a 'spirit type/userland' jailbreak. Well on http://www.redmondpie.com/ I read that Sn0wbreeze 1.6.2 had been released (July 1st) and that it would support phones jailbroken using spirit. I tried it. I followed step-by-step what was said and was soooooooooo close to jailbreaking, but it didn't work. For a while the phone didn't work at all.

>

I downloaded the official IPSW file because the one linked on the site didn't work. Sn0wbreeze cooked a new IPSW file but my phone wouldn't load it. (again if your phone means a lot to you and this means nothing don't get sucked in)

At this point I began to feel rather silly as I'd promised myself I wouldn't loose all my free apps to upgrade to something that wasn't much different than what I had.

My phone wouldn't switch on but, if I disconnected and re-connected to iTunes I did get a prompt saying I had to restore. If I tried to restore using 'shift' and the IPSW on my desktop it wouldn't work. In desperation I just did restore without using 'shift'. The iPhone was back to factory but automatically asked if I wanted to run my backup. I did this. It looked like it was adding everything (dodgy and all) but it wasn't really. It had an error at the end and, if you opened it, it told you that the dodgy apps hadn't been added. iOS 4 However was now added and working. All my legal software was good. My phone was perfect but not jailbroken.

In desperation I went back to http://www.redmondpie.com/ and downloaded redsn0w 9.5 b5-5. I extracted it. I ran the exe file. When it asked me to browse for an IPSW I browsed to the official apple one on my PC. C:\documents and settings\your user folder name\application data\apple computer\i tunes\iPhone software updates. Then I just followed the instructions and it worked.

I suspect it might have worked if I'd just upgraded to os4 and then run Redsn0w but I've no way of testing that theory.

It's also worth noting that my 3g does things like multi tasking that wouldn't work on the official download.

If you're struggling with this and there's something you think I can help with then use 'Comments' to give me a shout but I should be quick to add that I ain't got very much clue about this stuff myself. I only got the phone a couple of months ago.

Hope this helps..

T