think a thousand times before doing updates
Hi all,
I wanted to tell you guys a story about something I've been fighting with for the past 5 hours. Well, the whole thing has been going on for much longer so maybe I should start from the beginning.
It all started back when IOS 10 was coming out. I decided to find and install a developer profile on my IPhone 6. This developer profile would essentially make the phone believe it is signed to a developer account which would allow me to test developer versions of IOS 10, which are rolled out before public betas. Why did I want to do this? Because I was excited for some of the upcoming changes and wanted to see how they'd work in my own hands. I was impatient and impulsive. Besides, everyone else I knew was doing it and convinced me it wouldn't hurt, and it was super easy to go back. On many fronts they were right. It's not really hard to do, the hardest part really is finding a developer profile and Google is your friend for finding such things. Wit hin an hour the developer version of IOS was installed and I used developer betas until IOS 10 was released. Then I tried to erase my developer profile and bad things happened...
The developer profile had taken over as the default, meaning that I couldn't switch back to a standard profile as I was told to do. Unfortunately I was stuck on a prerelease version, so my only real option was to restore to factory settings. Problem though, is that you can't just slap backups created with a dev beta on a release version... from what I'm told it'll break things. If I'd had an IOS 9 backup handy, that wouldn't have been a problem, but I'd not had the forsight to do that because I assumed that upgrading from dev beta to full release would be easy. It probably should've been, but not for me. Okay so at the end of this I'll probably lose all my data. This didn't bother me much because most of the data I needed was backed up on the PC (mostl y recordings and big whatsapp archives which I didn't want taking up space on my phone).
I tried restoring the phone with ITunes but it didn't work, I can't remember why though. So I did some research which led me to this site. It has links to installation packages for IOS devices. Such packages are incredibly useful if you want to restore your phone offline, say, on a computer without Internet access. They are also useful if you jailbreak, or in my case, mess about with trying newer prereleases of IOS and want to go back to the old.
Anyway to fix my phone, I read a tutorial which told me to put my phone in DFU mode, restore to IOS 9.3, and then update to 10 normally. This actually did work. It was a lengthy endeavor but at the end of it, all was well.
About 6 months after that, I got the IPhone 7. The switch was for the most part painless. Then IOS 11 was announced. I fought with myself, should I go through that hassle a gain? Finally I decided that even though we were promised public betas at the end of the month, I would still at least try the dev beta released just a few weeks ago, with all intentions to stop using it as soon as either the public betas came out, or I decided I wanted to go back to 10 and wait until official release. The hassle would be worth it as I would make an IOS 10 backup beforehand, so I could just restore with that when I wanted to go back.
So I went through the hassle of finding a IOS 11 dev beta 2 profile and installing it. I played with it for a while, mostly to test some new Siri things I'd heard about. While everything worked well, it just wasn't exciting anymore. I couldn't really come up with a real reason to keep this on my phone any longer, I mean sooner or later I'll have to go back to normal configs anyway so might as well do it now. So tried to restore to get back to 10. First from the backup. Didn't quite go as planned as my sett ings and apps just murged with my IOS 11 installation, and now I was unable to get the developer profile off. Time to restore to factory defaults again...
Tried to restore from ITunes, didn't work. And because I'd unknowingly left ITunes out of date, it tried to install IOS 10.2.1, and it haulted that in the middle of the installation with errors. I did research and read that the errors I was getting were indicative of using an old version, so I finally updated. This time the restore completed successfully, but the phone did not boot and was stuck in recovery mode.
Fine, I'll grab the ipsw and restore from there. So I look and... on the aforementioned site, there are two versions of IOS 10.3.2 for my IPhone 7, global and GSM, which I think correspond to two models or revisions of the phone. I'd not noticed this last year when messing with this stuff for some reason. I grabbed both, not knowing which I'd need, and... the two are of exact same size , and according to the site anyway, their md5s are the same, leading me to believe that there is no difference between the two versions. Furthermore, ITunes would've detected if one of them was incorrect and refused to continue. But I tried restoring with both, and both actually were accepted by ITunes, but neither got the phone out of recovery mode, so I wasted a whole lot of time trying a bunch of repeated restores.
I haven't yet tried restoring to older versions of IOS. I might do that in a bit, though that also means I'll probably have to downgrade ITunes, because IOS 10.3.1 is the oldest version now which is signed by Apple. I don't even know if downgrading ITunes would allow me to go back to IOS versions older than that. At this point I'm grasping at straws now, though let's be honest, I've been doing that this whole time really. I don't know what else to do but take a trip to the AT&T store, but last time I went there, they we re not well equipped to deal with the problems we were experiencing, and were about to refer it to Apple. I eventually managed to fix said problems myself. Because I can't fix this one, I fear that I'll either have to send this thing to Apple and hope they can/will fix it, or replace a perfectly good phone which is only broken now because of my irresponsible actions. Though, one must admit that this is a little more than anyone could've bargained for and these things shouldn't happen. Isn't DFU mode meant to be the sort of end-all, akin to putting in a Windows disc and booting from there? If that doesn't work you've got a real problem! I mean, even people who jailbreak would try to restore in the ways I have described above, so I don't know what could've happened for it to be bricked this badly.
I guess this goes to show that you should always think a thousand times before testing prerelease versions of anything, or jailbreaking or anything like that, especially if it tampers with your operating system. I've seen Windows updates do similar things to Windows computers, after all, so every time you update, even if it's just minor, you are taking a risk. I don't even know if I'll be on apple's beta program anymore. Probably not for IOS 11 anyway, I can wait for a full release now after this crap.
So, does anyone have any ideas other than take it to an at&T/Apple store? If I don't soon get it working I will have to do just that. Regardless I'll keep the thread updated for the 2 people who are probably interested. Lol
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