Something went horribly, horribly wrong with my phone

[murdercitydevil]

I've been jailbroken on 4.1 (limera1n) ever since it's release and have never had any problems, my phone has been smooth and stable. Today, I tried to launch Beejive and it instantly crashed to springboard. Tried it again, same thing. So I restarted my phone. And that's when **** hit the fan. My phone is stuck in a respring loop, and I have absolutely no idea what caused it. As soon as my phone powers on, it resprings after a few seconds. Sometimes I can slide to unlock and see the icons fly in, sometimes I can even launch an app really quickly, but then it resprings. It restarts in safe mode, but instead of working fine in safe mode, it resprings by itself again, and this happens over and over again. I have tried removing all WB themes, I've reset all my modified fonts, I've uninstalled Beejive, and still it happens. Does anyone know what I can try before I'm reduced to restoring the whole thing and starting over? I can't even get to pkgbackup to make a backup.

Here's another very weird aspect to this - I've removed all themes like I said, but I noticed that even in safe mode, it was displaying themed icons. So I manually deleted Winterboard.app, and it STILL shoes all themed icons, even though winterboard and the theme files are not on the phone. WTF?

 

[TJone]

Are you using lockinfo and/or iblank by any chance? After upgrading to 4.1, green pois0n and using pkgbackup I immediately went into a respring loop and started unistalling things, iblank and then lockinfo and that fixed whatever was wrong. I reinstalled both later and now they both work fine. It can be anything probably but it may be worth checking those 2 first. Good luck- that is a pain...

 

[murdercitydevil]

Are you using lockinfo and/or iblank by any chance? After upgrading to 4.1, green pois0n and using pkgbackup I immediately went into a respring loop and started unistalling things, iblank and then lockinfo and that fixed whatever was wrong. I reinstalled both later and now they both work fine. It can be anything probably but it may be worth checking those 2 first. Good luck- that is a pain...

I do have iblank, let me try removing it.

EDIT: no change. The weirdest part about this is that the phone crashes even in safe mode. Which makes me think maybe something with limera1n itself went berserk, and I have no choice but to restore. God this sucks...I wish I knew why it's happening.

 

[MrThompsonR]

I've been jailbroken on 4.1 (limera1n) ever since it's release and have never had any problems, my phone has been smooth and stable. Today, I tried to launch Beejive and it instantly crashed to springboard. Tried it again, same thing. So I restarted my phone. And that's when **** hit the fan. My phone is stuck in a respring loop, and I have absolutely no idea what caused it. As soon as my phone powers on, it resprings after a few seconds. Sometimes I can slide to unlock and see the icons fly in, sometimes I can even launch an app really quickly, but then it resprings. It restarts in safe mode, but instead of working fine in safe mode, it resprings by itself again, and this happens over and over again. I have tried removing all WB themes, I've reset all my modified fonts, I've uninstalled Beejive, and still it happens. Does anyone know what I can try before I'm reduced to restoring the whole thing and starting over? I can't even get to pkgbackup to make a backup.

If you ran pkgbackup recently you can restore/ rejailbreak... install/ restore pkgbackup.

 

[TJone]

Try deleting any blank icons too. I don't think they will be removed by unistalling iBlank. Good luck.

 

[murdercitydevil]

Try deleting any blank icons too. I don't think they will be removed by unistalling iBlank. Good luck.

iBlanks are stored in var/mobile/library/Webclips right? Because I don't have any in there, I think I removed them all after I changed my theme around.

 

[TJone]

iBlanks are stored in var/mobile/library/Webclips right? Because I don't have any in there, I think I removed them all after I changed my theme around.

I think you are correct since they are just web links and I think that is where they get stored. Have you tried deactivating all your themes in Winterboard? Anything else you have installed recently with Cydia - try uninstalling the recent tweaks. Maybe mobile substrate is corrupt and you can try installing a different version? You may just need to restore if you don't have any luck soon though. I hope you get it sorted...

EDIT just confirmed that is where the iblank icons are stored

 

[murdercitydevil]

Yes, it seems like something somewhere got corrupted. The biggest giveaway is the whole safemode thing...I just hate situations like these, not because some kind of irreparable damage has been inflicted, but because I don't know what the problem is and can't fix it

Anyway, luckily the phone itself is still fully working, it's just the springboard that is screwed, so even though it's respringing itself every couple seconds, i can still do an itunes backup and minimize the amount of restoring. Any advice on which JB route to take this time around? Something tells me maybe limera1n was behind this snafu.

 

[murdercitydevil]

Well, i've gotten a little further in the investigation. Turns out whatever causes the respring crash loop is NOT jailbreak related. It's something contained within the files that iTunes backs up, e.g. contacts, photos, sms, events, etc. I just restored my phone and everything was fine until I restored from my last backup...now it's doing the same thing again. No jailbreak apps even installed at this point. What the hell do I do now? How can I narrow it down to what this could be?

All in all, I can safely say that whatever happened seriously ****ED me, I basically have to start from scratch. Huge hassle.

 

[andy9l]

I know this isn't much help (and I'm sorry I can't help) - but almost exactly the same thing happened to me some time back.

I used Green Pois0n and everything was working perfectly, then suddenly I think it was Settings.app crashed and closed. I re-sprang and, as you put it, that's when **** hit the fan. I was stuck in a continual re-spring loop, but the iPhone was seemingly working - Mac recognised it, iTunes picked it up and synced normally, I could SSH.

That gave me some hope so I reset the phone (hold power and home), but again it suffered the never-ending re-spring loop. I restored via iTunes and restored a backup. Since, I do experience slightly longer re-springs (which I suppose may be apparent because I'm paying attention to it now), but I haven't had anything to write home about.

I've been extremely select over which JB apps I install and have re-sprung/restarted after installing each to test them. I'm now pretty much back to where I started and haven't found one glitch yet.

If you do find out what was up, I'd love to know. I'm using an iPhone 4, 4.1 JB with Greenpois0n (RC4 now, RC3 previously).

Edit: If I may ask, could a few people post a rough time (in seconds (or minutes?!)) of how long it takes to re-spring their iPhone 4? Either via SBSettings or WinterBoard, but please state which. I'd be very grateful

 

[TJone]

You should use the set up as a new phone option when you dfu restore. It is more work but it should work better. It sounds like some tweak may have corrupted something. Are you sure you are using the original fonts too? I hear changing fonts can cause problems like this too if a font does not have a full character set. I think if you go back and restore again and set up as a new phone it should be back to normal though.

 

[ulbador]

Well, i've gotten a little further in the investigation. Turns out whatever causes the respring crash loop is NOT jailbreak related. It's something contained within the files that iTunes backs up, e.g. contacts, photos, sms, events, etc. I just restored my phone and everything was fine until I restored from my last backup...now it's doing the same thing again. No jailbreak apps even installed at this point. What the hell do I do now? How can I narrow it down to what this could be?

All in all, I can safely say that whatever happened seriously ****ED me, I basically have to start from scratch. Huge hassle.

I hate to say it, but this is why it is always recommended to set up as new. Every time I have ever jailbroken and clicked the restore from backup button, I have had nothing but weirdness and random errors. Almost everytime everything works as normal, and then I'll install something innocuous, like a theme (and not even apply it!) and my phone will crash and I'll have to restore.

 

[dhlizard]

You should use the set up as a new phone option when you dfu restore. It is more work but it should work better. It sounds like some tweak may have corrupted something. Are you sure you are using the original fonts too? I hear changing fonts can cause problems like this too if a font does not have a full character set. I think if you go back and restore again and set up as a new phone it should be back to normal though.

This ^^

 

[gnychis]

i had a similar problem where i had to restore through DFU

 

[murdercitydevil]

Yeah, I did a DFU restore...originally I tried using pwnagetool because I trust devteam more than anyone else, but preserving the baseband resulted in a hacktivated phone, which did not help me because I'm on ATT officially. So I DFU restored again with TU, then JB with greenpoison (which I wasn't too impressed with), but whatever, it got the job done. I had to restore from an old backup, from sometime in October, since my last backup like I said brought back the respring crash loop. Luckily it has most of my data on it, as well as my pkgbackup contact. I restored that and am now piecing back together my setup. I guess all I can do is be more careful with every single thing I install and make more regular backups. I hate when things break though completely out of the blue.