Recovering crashed iPhone

So I was bored with the few apps that come with the iPhone and talked with some people who used ZiPhone to jailbreak it. As expected, it was really easy. ZiPhone will also installs Installer.app, the package manager that will enable you to install lots of third party software.

One of these is OpenSSH (client & server). Obviously, the first thing to do when opening port 22 on this kind of device is to change the default (factory) password (which is alpine on newer iPhones, including firmware 1.1.4). Which is what I did (with passwd).

The problem is that it seems that changing the root password breaks SpringBoard. It will enter an endless loop and will keep crashing forever and showing a message box "edit home screen".


The solution to this problem is simple, you must restore the iPhone with iTunes. The problem for me was that the iPhone didn't show up in iTunes. The solution is to put your iPhone in DFU mode (Device Firmware Upgrade) as follows:


And then let iTunes do the magic for you and you're done! (Done on a 1.1.4, no warranty, hope this helps, happy jailbreaking!)