How to unbrick iPhone 3.0 beta
// April 4th, 2009 // 26 Comments » // General ramblings, development
I was recently faced with a bit of a problem, I had upgraded my iPhone to the new 3.0 beta, but I forgot to create a provisioning profile for the device from within my newly activated Developer Portal before the upgrade, this resulted in what pretty much resembled a brick.
The iPhone 3.0 upgrade also includes a baseband update which is not compatible with previous versions of the iPhone firmware, and as the download site warns, there is no turning back.
Apple pre-install advisery
So back to the brick, if I connected my now bricked iPhone to iTunes it displayed a message saying I needed to be a developer and add my device to my development device list. This however was not as straight forward as they said, because Xcode didn’t recognise the phone so there was no way to get the phones UDID which is required to add the phone to my developer portal. After digging around the file system for a while I stumbled upon a file in ~/Library/Lockdown which had a 40 character file name followed by .plist (Property List File), the filename looked like a SHA1 hash, and knowing the device UDID was 40 characters decided to type that into the developer portal and kick it in the guts, sure enough it worked.
Developer provisioning assistant
I downloaded the provisioning profile and dragged it onto the iTunes icon in my dock, reconnected my phone and it activated without a problem.
Update:
As Marc mentioned in the comments, you can also get the UDID from the USBProber that comes with the Apple dev tools.
