Last night I re-jailbroke my phone to try and get rid of an unknown battery drain issue. All went well until I tried to reinstall my Cydia apps. After queuing about 5 or so apps, installing them, and respringing, my iphone went into a loop where SpringBoard would not load, the MS SafeMode prompt would not popup, and basically my phone was dead (well not dead, SB kept crashing every 10-20 seconds or so, quite annoying). After spending about 2 hours on Google and everywhere, I finally got rid of the offending app and didn't have to restore to fix it. I figured I'd give a summary to help anyone out there who might ever run into a similar issue.
To start with, I always install SSH first thing, so that wasn't a problem, and eventually saved me.
I didn't have syslog running yet, as I was only in the "c"'s of my app reinstall. That was a problem. Googling I was able to find a guide on BigBoss to get that running: http://thebigboss.org/guides/enable-syslog-on-2x-for-debugging/ Guide say OS2, but worked fine on 3. Lesson Learned - install syslogd with ssh first thing before any other apps!
once I had that running, I could find the offending app (I think). Looks like a file I installed probably didn't install all of the dependencies since it was just a plugin for the app - Lesson Learned - install the app before installing the plugins, even if its out of your alphabetical install order
Next I figured out from google how to use dpkg and apt-get to uninstall the offending app from here: Great!!! Problem is I didn't have apt-get on the phone so I couldn't uninstall Lesson Learned - install APT 07 Strict along with SSH and syslog.
At this point I was quite dejected, but still didn't want to restore and start over. Then the little light bulb popped up over my head and I fixed all.
I ssh'd and navigated to /Library/Mobile Substrate/DynamicLibraries/ Once there I deleted the offending app files, and upon the next SB crash, it rebooted just fine I was sooo happy at that point.
Of course there are those of you out there who would have known to go there first and do that, but googling "Springboard crash loop" or any other combination of terms did not help, and googling "manually uninstall cydia app" only really found the apt-get method or other ways from the springboard, so I was out of luck. Therefore the reason I put this together is to help anyone else who might run into this issue and can't find a solution other than to restore.
The keys are to get the tools onto the phone first thing before installing anything else. Had i had syslog running, and apt-get on there, i probably would have saved an hour of headaches. Lesson learned!
To start with, I always install SSH first thing, so that wasn't a problem, and eventually saved me.
I didn't have syslog running yet, as I was only in the "c"'s of my app reinstall. That was a problem. Googling I was able to find a guide on BigBoss to get that running: http://thebigboss.org/guides/enable-syslog-on-2x-for-debugging/ Guide say OS2, but worked fine on 3. Lesson Learned - install syslogd with ssh first thing before any other apps!
once I had that running, I could find the offending app (I think). Looks like a file I installed probably didn't install all of the dependencies since it was just a plugin for the app - Lesson Learned - install the app before installing the plugins, even if its out of your alphabetical install order
Next I figured out from google how to use dpkg and apt-get to uninstall the offending app from here: Great!!! Problem is I didn't have apt-get on the phone so I couldn't uninstall
Lesson Learned - install APT 07 Strict along with SSH and syslog.At this point I was quite dejected, but still didn't want to restore and start over. Then the little light bulb popped up over my head and I fixed all.
I ssh'd and navigated to /Library/Mobile Substrate/DynamicLibraries/ Once there I deleted the offending app files, and upon the next SB crash, it rebooted just fine
I was sooo happy at that point.Of course there are those of you out there who would have known to go there first and do that, but googling "Springboard crash loop" or any other combination of terms did not help, and googling "manually uninstall cydia app" only really found the apt-get method or other ways from the springboard, so I was out of luck. Therefore the reason I put this together is to help anyone else who might run into this issue and can't find a solution other than to restore.
The keys are to get the tools onto the phone first thing before installing anything else. Had i had syslog running, and apt-get on there, i probably would have saved an hour of headaches. Lesson learned!
