iPhone Teardown - Cutting a cable

[Lincoln]

Some of you may have heard of my V1's problems - if not, it's lock button got jammed in the casing and I brilliantly stuck a paperclip inside the phone to pop it back up - the paperclip got stuck. Since then, the thing's been in an endless boot cycle. Today, I decided I would tear it down to see if anything could be done from the inside, as I would like to regain at least some of this thing's functionality. I've gotten this far:



In the progress of disassembling it, I found a way to get it into recovery mode, so updating to 3.0 will be possible. However, because the lock button's suck, it won't stay in recovery mode - the phone "thinks" I'm doing rebooting it, which kicks it out of recovery mode. I can't fix the button, but I may have a way of killing it's connection to the phone. There's one thing connecting the front part of the phone to the back casing, and I think I can cut it without loosing much functionality. From what I can tell, I would loose the lock button (what I'm aiming for), the headphone jack, the silent mode toggle switch, and the volume controls - I can live without all of those. My question is this: if I cut this cord, are the above mentioned things all that I will loose; will everything else still work as intended? If so, I'm going to do it.

For reference, this is the wire I'm talking about:

[The Apple]

You cannot disassemble the lock button or physically move it to the original position so it does not make a closed contact? I am making assumptions that this button is a normally open circuit that is closed when the button is depressed so if you can open the switch by any means it should resolve the situation. I would not cut any conductor strips, as they would have to be replaced if needed to function. They should be able to be disconnected properly without cutting the ribbon.

Check this out and see if it will help you any.
http://www.portatronics.com/guide/iPhone-Repair-Guide/

Be patient when making detailed repairs like this. If you start to feel frustrated, leave it and come back when you are ready. I do not even know if you can replace that switch because I have never repaired an iPhone.