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Upgrading iPhone 2G to 3.1
system, hacks, open source, educationWarning: The following assumes that you have a 2G iPhone, a Mac laptop or desktop and some familiarity with the command-line.
I just had perhaps the most painless iPhone OS upgrade from 3.0.1 to 3.1. (here is the last installment on upgrading to 3.0.1)
You'll want a copy of the firmware file (IPSW) for iPhone OS 3.1 and PwnageTool from the iPhone Dev Team (you can get iPhone firmware here and PwnageTool 3.1 here). This time we'll create a custom IPSW so get any custom boot logos handy
Here's what you do:
- Install aptbackup from Cydia if you haven't already. Use it to back up your Cydia apps.
- Sync with iTunes and be sure that it creates a backup (this will be your reference if you mess up, mostly).
- Aptbackup has a nasty habit of not working. It really kind of sucks, but it's good for creating a list of installed Cydia apps. So, per this post, SSH into your phone and copy over to your computer the files
aptbackup.cydiasources.tgz
,aptbackup_dpkg-packages.txt
andaptbackup_openssh.tgz
found at/var/mobile/Library/Preferences
. - Open PwnageTool and create a custom IPSW... I'd just recommend following these directions from hackintosh. They work well.
- You will want to restore from the backup you made earlier using iTunes to get your settings and stuff back.
- If you're on T-Mobile like me and subscribe to a data plan, you'll want to make sure that you have
wap.voicestream.com
set as yourAPN
in Settings -> General -> Network -> Cellular Data Network. Otherwise, you'll see an error that reads: "Could not activate cellular data network: You are not subscribed to a cellular data service". - To avoid major lameness, don't use AptBackup to actually do the restore. On your computer, do a
less aptbackup_dpkg-packages.txt
to list the packages that you had installed via Cydia, and manually install them one-by-one. Yeah, it sucks, but it sucks less that not having your AppStore apps! (I had a particularly lame experience with AptBackup trying to use it to restore my Cydia apps. As outlined in this post, after running AptBackup, all my AppStore apps disappeared. They showed up in SBSettings and were still listed in the Applications pane of iTunes, but it appeared as if AptBackup had uninstalled these apps from my phone!) - Now it's just a matter of moving your icons to the right place.
- I'd suggest changing the passwords for both the
root
andmobile
users... from the default ofalpine
to something more substantial. (To do this, ssh into the phone as root, dopasswd
for root and then dosu mobile
to change yourself to the usermobile
and dopasswd
for that user too.) - If you use Cycorder, you'll also need to re-establish the symbolic link between where cycorder stores its videos and AirSharing, if you had it set up like that. (Do that as the
mobile
user so the permissions line up.)
UPDATE [2009-10-05T11:16:56]: added bit about APN
to get data network back.
Unfortunately, yesterday I tried to restore using AptBackup and got exactly the same result as you: all my AppStore applications disappeared from the SpringBoard.
Using ssh and a terminal, I was able to find out that the data is still in the phone (in various subdirectories in the /var/mobile/Applications directory), but without any icon to launch the apps, it's not going to be very usefull...
At least I have some hope to be able to restore part of the data stored there after reinstalling each and every application, but all in all I'd say that unless you have much more Cydia apps than AppStore apps, restoring with AptBackup isn't worth the effort. :-(