Can the Bootloader be upgraded?

[OnTheBandwagon]

In late July I succesfully Jailbroke and unlocked my 3G iPhone running 3.1.3 and then sold it to my Brother in Law. He has been using it with T-Mobile since then.

I used pwntool, then fuzzyband to change the baseband, and then ultrasn0w



A couple days ago, he accidentally upgraded to 4.1

I tried to help him out today. I still had my custom .ipsw file I had made for him, and so I used pwntool to reinstall that .ipsw (3.1.3)

That worked fine, but when I tried to use fuzzyband, it said something to the effect of "Does not work on Bootloader 05.09"

Now, from what I've gathered, this means that the iPhone previously had 05.08 when I originally unlocked it, but now, due to the upgrade, it was changed to 05.09

But where I am confused is this. I keep reading everywhere that bootloaders are part of the hardware and CANNOT be changed.

Do people simply mean bootloaders cannot be DOWNgraded, or can they really never be changed.

Because if the can not be changed at all then I am really confused as to how I was originally able to change the baseband and unlock the iPhone. Everything I am reading says that 05.09 cannot be unlocked.

Also, I purchased the phone whithin a couple weeks of launch, so that seems consistent with it originally having 05.08.

So basically, I want to know if the bootloader was indeed upgraded when ios4.1 was installed.

And also it based on everything I've read, my Brother in Law is SOL at least for now, correct?


Thanks very much. I've been trying to figure this out on my own but often the info seems contradictory, or possible out of date.

 

[crawsfire]

Hi,
Are you sure it's the same phone? I've never heard of a 5.8 bootloader being changed to a 5.9. I don't think it's possible without a soldering iron

Use the f0recast tool and see what it says.

 

[OnTheBandwagon]

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Thanks. According to my brother in law, yeah. I suppose it's possible that someone switched them or perhaps he lost it and was afraid to admit it so he replaced it. But that really does not sound like him.

Just to confirm there is no way that fuzzyband would work with 5.9

 

[crawsfire]

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Thanks. According to my brother in law, yeah. I suppose it's possible that someone switched them or perhaps he lost it and was afraid to admit it so he replaced it. But that really does not sound like him.

Just to confirm there is no way that fuzzyband would work with 5.9

Not that I am aware of. If you need service on a locked iphone these are the providers that I know of that you can use their sim cards in an iphone without being jailbroken and unlocked because they use the AT&T network:
AT&T gophone prepaid (obviously)
Pure Prepaid
Pure TalkUSA
7-11 Speak Out wireless (be careful some use sprint and some AT&T)
Consumer Cellular
GTC wireless
Jolt Wireless
Locus Mobile (be careful some use Verizon and some AT&T)
TracFone (be careful they use multiple providers including AT&T)

I'm sure there are a lot more. Personally I use Pure TalkUSA. There is no data though, I use wifi.

 

[OnTheBandwagon]

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Is it possible that fuzzyband is reporting the bootloader incorrectly? (that it is still 5.8 but fuzzyband thinks it's 5.9)

This is really baffling to me.

And thanks for the info re the other plans.

 

[crawsfire]

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Is it possible that fuzzyband is reporting the bootloader incorrectly? (that it is still 5.8 but fuzzyband thinks it's 5.9)

This is really baffling to me.

And thanks for the info re the other plans.

What does the f0recast tool say?

 

[OnTheBandwagon]

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Sorry. I don't have the phone with me anymore. He took it back home. I will instruct him to do this and check it out.

Thanks

 

[crawsfire]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8B117 Safari/6531.22.7)

Sorry. I don't have the phone with me anymore. He took it back home. I will instruct him to do this and check it out.

Thanks

There may be some program on the phone that is causing fuzzyband to get a false bootloader reading. Seems unlikely but if you run out of options you can get the phone as clean and virgin as you can and then try fuzzyband again. It is a pretty weird situation you have, that's for sure.