Bricking an iPhone experiment. An yes, iP4 can be downgraded from 5.1.1

[0m3ga]

Please note, it is extremely difficult to brick an iphone, barring pysical damage, i.e. Water

Today, I attempted to brick (and I do mean brick both a jailbroken iP4 on 5.0.1, a non-jailbroken phone on 5.0.1, and a non-jailbroken iP4 on 5.1.1 with no luck. I was always able to restore via itunes.

I tried an old method of disconnecting the iPhone in the middle of the firmware download. No joy.
I went into iFile and deleted all the system files in the system folder. No joy. Then tried deleting every file on the phone. No joy. I then tried deleting every file via ssh and ifunbox... No joy.
I tried loading what I knew was a bad tweak in cydia to cause an infinite boot loop and again no joy.

No matter what was tried, I could always restore to 5.1.1 and then downgrade back to 5.0.1. Point is, people that say their phone is bricked after loading something, doing a firmware upgrade, etc... Are not bricked. If you are not familiar with ifunbox, redsnow, tinyumbrella, ifile and so on, take it to the Apple store and they will be able to restore it, even if it appears to be dead. Only way, I can see to brick a phone is by an electrical surge, water damage, or dropping it and causing some internal damage to the CPU, GPU, battery or connectors.

And yes, iPhone 4 users, you can dowgrade from 5.1.1. Sorry iPhone 4s users, you can not. A4 chips only.

* Note: I am not like i0n1c, Saurik, or the rest of the dev team. I am an average user, doing things the average user would like firmware updates, loading tweaks from cydia and altering files in iFile. I have no knowledge of XCode. I am sure if someone with that level of knowledge wanted to brick a phone via software, they probably could.

 

[labman]

mist of us already new this. Btw if your goal is to brick you will have more luck messing up the radio via baseband try forcing the iPad baseband that should fry your radio and thus brick it.

 

[3bs]

We'll be able to downgrade soon enough

 

[0m3ga]

mist of us already new this. Btw if your goal is to brick you will have more luck messing up the radio via baseband try forcing the iPad baseband that should fry your radio and thus brick it.

Yeah, I forgot to mention, Iattempted to use my ipad bb and redsnow was having none of it. Unless, there is another program to force my ipad bb?

 

[labman]

why are you trying to force brick it. We know it's near impossible what is to be gained?

 

[Bl0ckHe1d]

why are you trying to force brick it. We know it's near impossible what is to be gained?

I think he is trying to make a point by saying "you cannot brick your iDevice", obviously not short of a few pennies/cents...!

Unless of course - you are a plonker by placing the iDevice in water or fry the radio from using the iPad baseband!

 

[JZTech101]

It is virtually impossible to brick an idevice without physical damage. The reason being that the ROM (Read-Only Memory) is built into the device and cannot be modified without hardware revision. This controls DFU mode as well as recovery mode.

But if you really want to try it, write an App to write over the SSD a million times over. It will damage the SSD and therefore "brick the device"