iPhone restore stuck at 'Verifying Restore with Apple'

Hi All,

I was trying to help a friend of mine was trying to unlock his AT&T 3gs phone. His phone was only upgraded to 4.01 (nothing later). I thought the best thing to do would be to reinstall 4.01 firmware, go to jailbreakme.com, and then install ultrasn0w through Cydia. Whenever I try to restore 4.01 firmware, I get stuck on 'Verifying Restore with Apple', which eventually leaves me with 'Error 3194'. I even tried putting the phone in both recovery and DFU modes before trying to restore. Any other ideas would be very much appreciated!

Btw, no matter what I do, I can't get out of recovery mode -- I can only get to DFU mode.

Thanks for the reply! Wow that really blows... We don't have a backup of the signature file. :/

I also tried to restore with a Snowbreeze hacked 4.0 ipsw (after putting the iphone in DFU mode). I'm assuming that returned error 1600 because we're trying to revert to an older OS version.

Unfortunately jailbreaking his existing firmware showed some very weird behavior, and the ultrasn0w unlock didnt even work. Now I can't even get back to that faulty firmware (stuck in recovery or dfu mode)... I guess he's just gonna have to install 4.1 and wait for another jailbreak/unlock to come along.

Thanks!

Is jailbreakme.com the only way to jailbreak 4.01 firmware?
I will give TinyUmbrella a try, thanks again!