For those of you that lock up your iPhone installing apps..

[elkay]

I've got a way around restoring. I haven't "fully" tried it yet, but I was able to unbrick my phone without a restore/flash. You must have OpenSSH installed. If you reboot your phone (hold both buttons at once for 5-10 seconds until the phone shuts off, then power the phone back on), the phone "appears" to be locked up. Not quite.

The phone is stuck in a loop with something going up, but it's not to the point that the OS is unresponsive. With OpenSSH installed, you can still get into the phone for a few minutes at this point with programs such as WinSCP. I was somewhat surprised at this point, so what happens from here is somewhat experimental. My only goal at that point was to see what I could do to try to get the phone to boot. Surprisingly, the first thing I tried did it. What I did is browse to the Apps folder /private/var/mobile/Applications, then just select all the folders (there's one for each app you installed) and simply delete them all. The moment WinSCP deleted the last folder, the iPhone immediately went to the Springboard. I didn't even have to reboot.

Now, my apps were all gone, but all I had to do was go into iTunes, uncheck all of the installed apps, sync, then recheck the ones I had installed, and sync again (this was easy because I have all but 2 installed). All of my settings were reset, but it was far less painless than starting from scratch. At this moment I'm copying all of the Applications folder to my PC because I have 3 more apps with updates. If this happens again, I'm going to test to see if copying them back after deleting them and simply rebooting gets all of the apps back, too. If anyone else happens to be bricked again before I do and tries this, let us know how it goes. Keep in mind you may need to reset permissions on the app folders.

Hope this saves you as much times as it saved me! Let's hope Apple fixes this minor glitch in what appears to simply be the reconstruction of the Springboard icon file (maybe this is something to look into, too?)

[elkay]

Ok, well it froze again trying to install Winterboard (seem to freeze on every single new app install now, even starting from scratch). I even cleared a first page slot for it. Going to do some experimenting.

[elkay]

It came back as soon as I deleted the last *App Store* app that was on the first page. This left about 1/3 of my downloaded apps on other various pages. Note that Customize, Cydia and now Winterboard were all still/now available on the first page, along with all firmware apps. Will have to do more testing if it freezes again, but perhaps a temp fix is to get all App Store apps off the first page of Springboard before install/update?

EDIT: Went ahead and removed the rest of the apps from the Applications directory since I'd backed them all up before this attempt. In the middle of copying them all back now. Should be interesting.

EDIT 2: Copy down from device: 10 minutes. Copy back to device: estimated 3 hours 47 minutes. Fail! I guess I'll let you guys know tomorrow morning what transpired. Anyone else try messing with this yet?

[elkay]

Copying all of the apps back refroze the phone. Removing only the first page ones did not unfreeze it. Continuing to remove apps a few at a time eventually brought it back again. Perhaps it's a max number of apps threshold or something. Apps copied back will not launch though, even with permissions and owner (I think) set correctly. I'm setting them 755 and mobile:wheel, recursively. Anyone have any idea why they won't launch anymore?

EDIT: Went ahead and let iTunes reinstall all of my apps. Everything still boots fine again. So decided to see if I could copy the apps back to get my settings back, starting with AIM. Hmm. Directory isn't there. I thought the folder name for each app was consistent, but apparently everytime you install an app, even if it's the same app, it gets installed to a new unique directory name. Next thing to try: simply copy the contents of an app's directory back over to the device. Fail. AIM opened but almost immediately closed. Set owner back to mobile:wheel again recursively on the app directory. Still won't launch, and still not sure why it won't.

So to sum things up: As of right now, this will unlock your device so that your jailbroken apps are still there and you don't lose any phone settings/themes etc, but you'll still need to resync your apps from scratch.

[elkay]

Another step closer. All you actually have to do to get back in the system is chmod 0000 * inside the Applications folder for your downloaded apps. Unfortunately, when I chmod 0755 * only about half the apps came back. So far unable to determine the cause of that.