How to Undo a Jailbreak
I performed a jailbreak on my iPhone 4 so I could check out the Cydia store, but now I want to reverse that. I’m a little nervous, though. Will I brick my phone?
First click the Restore button in iTunes, then another Restore button in the “Are you sure?” dialog.
No, not at all! Just connect it to your Mac, launch iTunes, and sync it normally to create a backup. Then in the Summary screen for your device in iTunes, click the Restore button. That’ll restore it back to new, updating it to the newest version of iOS in the process. Then when it asks you if you want to set up your phone as a new one or restore it to a backup, choose the backup you just made. Voilà, simple. You’ll lose Cydia or any other jailbreak-only applications and stores. But the rest of your data, applications, and settings will be untouched.
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Jeronwong
March 17, 2011 at 7:30pm
Lol this was kinda late...Cydia decided to delete all my repositories and packages, despite the themes still being there in Winterboard. I already restored it and got caught by AT&T for not using a data plan in the process of restoring. For some reason, AT&T didn't catch me when i had a jailbreak, but that's probably because I turned of Data under SBSettings.
A.Jeter
March 17, 2011 at 7:24pm
It's not always as simple as that. I changed my root password to keep anyone from hacking my device. Subsequently I downloaded an app that was listed as iPhone 4 compatible but really wasn't. It rendered my phone completely useless. I tried to restore in iTunes but kept getting errors. My phone was stuck on the Connect to iTunes screen. I tried Tiny Umbrella, Recboot, etc to no avail. I thought it was bricked. After about a thousand tries it finally restored in iTunes even though I didn't do anything new or different. Lucky I guess because at that point I'd already decided to get a new iPhone, I was just waiting for the Apple Store to open. Be careful about Jailbreaking. I won't do it again even though I miss MyWi.
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