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Hls811

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Apr 19, 2004
832
55
New Jersey
I hope this question doesn’t get lost among all of the 3G questions that’ll be popping up but here it goes…

I just bought a 16GB 1st Gen iPhone off eBay – the guy posted it saying that it was frozen and he couldn’t get it off the “connect your iPhone” screen (the one that shows the dock connector and is telling you to plug into iTunes) – I took my chances and bought it since I had a similar issue with my old iPhone and was able to get it working w/ iLiberty. Anyway – I got the phone yesterday, connected it ran iLiberty – and viola – jailbroken, activated and restored perfectly. Here’s the problem – the home button and the on/off/hold buttons are unresponsive.. I press them and nothing happens.. I can’t even do the hard reset because it doesn’t respond to me holding both of them. The only way I can turn it on is to plug it into the PC or wall – I can navigate with the screen fine, but whatever app I open I’m stuck with because I can’t hit the home button to close it.

So, I went to the Apple Warranty status page to see if there was any warranty left – I put in the serial # and it says it can’t find it. (Just for a comparison, I made up a # too and it gives a different message when its not a valid serial). I even went through the country list and tried all the countries w/ the serial but same thing…

So then I called Apple Support, explained the problem and he couldn’t find the serial either which he said was very odd… Now, there’s the thing – I used to have an iPhone (I sold it when the 3G was announced thinking I’d get that.. when the pricing was announced I decided to go back to a 1st gen as it suited my finances better) – well, when I had my older 1st Gen I had it unlocked and wasn’t on an AT&T iphone plan. The guy I called at Apple Support said that without an AT&T contract the software isn’t covered, but if there was a hardware issue I would still be eligible for the 1 year coverage but since he couldn’t find my serial # he couldn’t verify anything. He suggested going to a Genious bar – at least they’d be able to physically see I had an iPhone, there’s a valid serial engraved on it (and it matches the serial iTunes shows and the properties on the iphone itself show) and they could *hopefully* swap it out since malfunctioning buttons should be hardware. He made an appointment for me for tomorrow afternoon at my local store.

Here’s my question(s): I still don’t have a valid AT&T SIM to plug in, so right now I have the iPhone restored back to factory condition (power it on and only have the ability to make an emergency call). Should I keep it like that or jailbrake it so at least its activated. If I do a jailbrake w/ iLiberty is there anything on there that would let them know its jailbroken and potentially cause me more issues? Also, is it safe for me to say that I don’t intend to sign up for service, I just want to use it as an ipod touch (and that’s why I don’t have a contract w/ AT&T).
 
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