Now, I do not really advocate going around the official way of doing things, but sometimes it is impossible to do things the official way. For instance, I wanted to get an iPhone contract with O2 when the iPhone first came out last year, but they refused to give me a contract based on my credit score even when i offered to pay off the one year contract from the start, so I bought the iPhone anyway, unlocked it and started using it.

When the 2.0 software came out, as with every other iPhone user, I couldn’t wait to upgrade. Unfortunately, upgrading meant losing my phones unlocked status. So I had to wait for someone to come up with the unlock for the phone. On Sunday, the iphone dev team came up with an update to their pawnage tool which could unlock iPhone 2.0 firmware. However, somewhere along the line, I managed to upgrade the iPhone to the 2.0 firmware, put the phone in restore mode and any attempt to restore the phone will result in a 1604 error. For anyone who might have hurridly upgraded their iPhone 1^st generation and run into this problem, here is what I did to get my phone restored, upgraded and unlocked.

You’ll need these software so you might as well get busy downloading them. Although I use a mac, for some reason I had more success with windows, so the software here are windows based.

iTunes 7.5 (Windows Version)
iPhone Firmware 1.1.4
Kiphone
Ziphone
iTunes 7.7
Pwnage tool (Mac version)

Ok… let’s begin..

First off, if you have iTunes 7.7 already installed, uninstall it and install iTunes 7.5. I had some problems with iTunes 7.5 on my Mac so I used the windows version. Note, you will have to rename the iTunes folder in your my documents music folder before iTunes 7.5 will work. Otherwise it will complain that the library has been created by a newer version of iTunes and will immediately quit.

Once you have iTunes installed, put your iPhone in DFU mode. If like me, you somehow placed you iPhone in restore mode, put off the iPhone by holding down the power and home key until the screen goes black then release it. You have to get the timing right otherwise the iPhone will just restart again. Once you have put off the phone, connect you iPhone to the computer via the usb. If the phone comes on again, turn it off.Hold down the power and home key for 10s then release the power key and hold the home key for an additional 10s, iTunes will start detecting the phone once you have entered DFU mode.

iTunes will now ask you to restore the phone, hold the shift key down (alt on a Mac) and click the restore button and browse to your 1.1.4 firmware. If all goes well, it should restore the iPhone. Once it has finished restoring the iPhone, it will throw up an error and go into restore mode. This is normal. Use Ziphone to kick it out of restore mode (do not activate or unlock it yet). Once it is out of restore mode and it is on the activation screen, use kiphone to downgrade the baseband (check all three boxes). This is because when you upgraded to 2.0, the baseband also got upgraded. Once kiphone has done its work, restore the phone again, it shouldn’t give any errors this time and use ziphone to activate and unlock it using the do it all option.

Upgrade your iTunes to version 7.7 and download the latest firmware (download only do not restore). Using instructions from here, create a custom firmware using pwnage, restore your iPhone using the custom firmware and voila, you have your unlocked and activated iPhone.