Can't Activate iPhone 3GS iOS 5.0.1

[sazafraz]

I've had the 3GS with 4.3 firmware previously and have unlocked it by installing the iPad baseband and jailbroken it as well. Now I read about upgrading to iOS 5 and it said if you do it won't be unlocked anymore and the baseband will not be preserved. I was fine with this because I want to sell the phone to someone who is with the service provider that the phone was originally intended for.

However when I upgraded to iOS 5, I can't even activate the phone with the SIM card of the service provider that the phone is intended for. I know this SIM is legit and works on other phones but it won't activate on this 3GS.

What's wrong?

Thanks

[sazafraz]

bump

[BonBowman]

Did you update in iTunes with firmware downloaded from Apple? If so you probably won't be able to unlock it again but it sounds like you're not interested in that anyways.

I was having the same problem with activation, but I needed to keep it unlocked. I was finally able to activate it by creating a custom firmware with the new PwnageTool 5.0.1 release available here: http://blog.iphone-dev.org


PwnageTool includes an activation option check box.

I used PwnageTool to create a new custom firmware, but the DFU option in PwnageTool never seems to work for me so I used redsn0w_0.9.10b1 (also newly released and available at the link above) to enter into pwned DFU and then restored in iTunes with the new PwnageTool built firmware. Somewhere in the process Itunes came up with an error saying that my iphone was not eligible for this build or something like that, but after I reset my iphone it was instantly recognized by iTunes as having already been activated (even though there was no SIM card in it) and asked if I'd like to restore from a previous backup. After that I just installed the new version of Ultrasn0w and was good to go with any SIM card.

You can read more about my situation here: http://www.iphoneforums.net/forum/ip...64/#post154587