Book of James iPhone

Found this post online that is really useful for those people who experience problems with their iPhones hanging at the startup "Apple Logo" screen.

Here are the instructions:

WARNING: If this repair fails you will have a device that will reboot every 10 to 12 minutes - until you restore the full device from scratch. So try this repair as a last chance to recover from a “endless boot” device.

Read all steps before you begin. Step 1 and 2 (and step 3 and 4 later on) have to be completed in a few minutes since your phone will probably reboot after some time.

1.) First connect your phone to the Computer via cable and switch it on. Open up the free application DiskAid and make sure your phone is found. Then quickly change the small selector at the bottom left to “Root Folder”. Use “Copy to folder” to save the folder “mobilewatchdog.bundle” at “/System/Library/SystemConfiguration/” to you Computer. You will need this folder later again!

2.) Now delete the folder “mobilewatchdog.bundle” on the device by using the “Delete from Device” button.

Basically you delete the startup of a system daemon that will check every 2-3 minutes if Springboard could be loaded. If Springboard is not loaded “mobilewatchdog” would reboot your phone. Deleting this process will prevent the system from rebooting every 2-3 minutes. Still, every 10 minutes or so the system will still reboot by another process that cannot be deleted. But this 10 minutes should be enough to get your Springboard preferences restored :)

3.) Reboot. Wait. If you get to your SpringBoard again (or to the PIN screen) everything went fine. If your phone reboots again after 10-12 minutes without showing anything except your Apple or Pineapple logo then this repair failed and you have to fully restore your phone. But this never happened to me so far.

4.) Hurry! On SpringBoard you should open up Cydia and install “OpenSSH” as quick as possible! The phone will certainly reboot within 10-12 minutes and you want the installation do be finished by then!

Extra: If you do not see your Cydia logo on SpringBoard but you are sure it is installed - then you quickly go to the “Settings” panel, choose “General”, “Restrictions” and enable them. Then disable them again. This should bring you all your applications back to the SpringBoard!

5.) Installation done? Check if you can login via SSH to your phone.

6.) Reboot again and copy the “mobilewatchdog.bundle” files back to their location (/System/Library/SystemConfiguration/) by using DiskAid again or by using an SFTP client and the SSH login.

7.) Make sure you login via SSH and set the correct permissions of the files! If you do not do so the phone will still reboot every 10-12 minute since “mobilewatchdog.bundle” cannot be loaded at startup of the phone! enter these 3 commands when logged into your phone:

chmod 755 /System/Library/SystemConfiguration/mobilewatchdog.bundle
chmod 755 /System/Library/SystemConfiguration/mobilewatchdog.bundle/mobilewatchdog
chmod 644 /System/Library/SystemConfiguration/mobilewatchdog.bundle/Info.plist

If the files were put on the right location there should be no error message.

8.) Reboot again.

Thats it!