Sebastian Foss Blog

Step 1

First, I would like to say thanks again to gray, iProof, dinopio, lazyc0der, anonymous, the dev team, nightwatch, and everyone who donated. Without them, there would be no unlock today, and I surely wouldn’t be up at 8AM.
Second, you may brick your iPhone using this tutorial. YOU ARE WARNED.
Okay on to the actual step. Remove the black part, the three screws, and the aluminum case. Disconnect the wire connecting the phone to the case. Do not remove anything else. Comment on these posts if you are with me so far. Once we get a good number of comments I’ll move on.

Howto open your iPhone:

	Antenna Cover (product details: IF105-009) This image shows the two tabs and two catches located on the underside of the antenna cover. The two tabs at the top of the image must be pushed towards the black cover to release them.
	Insert a metal spudger into the slot between the dock connector and the antenna cover. Be sure not to slide the spudger into the dock connector itself. Gently pry up near the two tabs to create a small gap between the antenna cover and the silver front bezel.
	Insert an iPod opening tool in the gap between the antenna cover and the front bezel. The wedge should be pointing towards the antenna cover. Slide the tool around the corner and up until you reach the metal backing. Repeat the same procedure on the other side of the dock connector.

• Grasp the antenna cover on either side and slide it up and away from the iPhone. This requires some force. If it does not come free, ensure that the antenna cover is lifted up enough to free the catches.

click image to enlarge	Headphone Jack (product details: IF105-001) Remove the three Phillips #00 screws securing the rear panel to the iPhone.
	Getting the iPhone open is a challenging feat, so don’t get discouraged. Take a deep breath and make sure you have plenty of time to get the job done. Begin the process of removing the rear panel on the side without buttons. As the first side of the case is more difficult to free, this will help prevent any damage to the buttons or the surrounding case. Insert the pointed end of a heavy-duty spudger into the space between the gray metal bar and the rear panel. Pry the panel up enough until you can get the tip of the iPod opening tool into the seam between the front bezel and rear panel.
	Slide the iPod opening tool along the edge of the case, releasing the four tabs. Once you’ve freed the side of the case, be sure not to accidentally snap the case back together.

click image to enlarge	Remove the two Phillips #00 screws securing the on/off switch to the rear panel.
	Remove the following 3 screws: Two Phillips #00 screws securing the vibrator to the rear panel. One larger head and longer Phillips #00 screw securing the headphone jack to the rear panel.
	Grasp the metal screw plate attached to the on/off switch and lift slightly up and away from the rear panel. The button should come with the cable. Gently peel up the on/off switch ribbon cable. Be sure to pull near where the ribbon cable is glued to the rear panel.

click image to enlarge	The headphone jack is slightly recessed into the rear panel. First slide the headphone jack away from its housing and then lift it up slightly (only 1/4 inch or 1/2 cenitmeter) so that it is no longer in the rear panel.
	Grasp the headphone jack at the tip and gently lift up, pulling the vibrator out of the rear panel.
	Remove the two Phillips #00 screws securing the silent/ring switch to the rear panel.

click image to enlarge	Grasp the silent/ring switch and lift it up to reveal the screw beneath.
	Remove the three Phillips #00 screws securing the volume switch to the rear panel.
	Lift the headphone jack assembly out of the rear panel.

click image to enlarge

Rear Panel (product details: IF105-000)

• Rear panel remains.

Step 2

Also remove the metal cover over the comm board. This is all the disassembly you have to do. If you feel like being safe, desolder the battery red lead. I didn’t

Step 3

The red line is covering the A17 trace. In order to trick the chip into thinking the flash is erased in the correct section, you will need to pull this high. Scrape away at the trace with something like a multimeter probe. Then solder a very thin wire to it. Be very careful. Only scrape away at that solder mask above that one trace. YOU DO NOT WANT TO BREAK THE TRACE. This is the hardest step in the whole process; the rest is cake. Also solder a wire to the 1.8v line. Connect to wire coming from the trace and the wire coming from the 1.8v to your unlock switch. Be careful, you only get one chance to do this right. Thanks again to Nick Chernyy for the picture.

My Finished Step 3

Hopefully yours will look like this.

Zoomed In Step 3

You can do it. I believe in you.

Step 4

Ok, time to test what you just soldered. First use the continuity check on a multimeter to make sure the wires aren’t shorting to ground or to each other. Make sure your switch is in the off position. Power up your iPhone. Hopefully it didn’t smoke Now go into minicom to tty.baseband and send a few commands, AT a few times will do. It should respond OK. Now flip your switch, the baseband should stop responding. Even when you flip it back, the baseband still shouldn’t respond. Be sure your switch is off, then open another ssh and run “bbupdater -v” You can get bbupdater off the ramdisk. This should reset the baseband, and minicom should start working again. If it did this, your soldering is most likely good, and you are ready to actually start unlocking your phone!!!

Step 5

If it passed the checks in step 4, congratulate yourself. You are a pro solderer. Go eat lunch. If not, don’t worry yet. I must’ve thought I bricked my phone 100 times. First of all, to power up your phone you don’t need to reconnect the case with the power button. Just connect it with USB, it’ll power itself up. Secondly, don’t waste time compiling minicom. Download the binary here, and termcap here.

Step 6

Now, with the switch off, your baseband should be working perfectly. Here you should take a NOR dump of your phone. The dev team’s NORDumper is a great way to do this. This is good to have in case something goes wrong. You can extract the firmware from this as well, which we’ll get to later.

Step 7

So here is the first tool release, iEraser. This erases the current firmware on your modem. Don’t worry, you can always put it back with bbupdater. Here how the bootrom check works; it reads from 0xA0000030 0xA000A5A0 0xA0015C58 0xA0017370 and all these addresses must read as blank, or 0xFFFFFFFF. When you erase flash, it becoms 0xFFFFFFFF. But you can’t erase those locations, because they are in the bootloader. So thats where the testpoint comes in. Pulling A17 high hardware OR’s the address bus with 0×00040000(offset one because data bus is 16 bit) So the bootrom instead checks locations 0xA0040030 0xA004A5A0 0xA0045C58 0xA0047370, which are in the main firmware and can be erased. Pretty genius
To use this tool, you need the secpack from your modems version. The erase of this section is protected. Check the modem version in Settings->About. It’ll either be 3.12(1.0) or 3.14(1.0.1 and 1.0.2). You need the ramdisk which cooresponds to your version. Then go into “/usr/local/standalone/firmware” and get the ICE*.fls file. Extract 0×1a4-0×9a4 and save it in a file called secpack and place it in the same directory as the ieraser tool. Run ieraser. This should erase the modem firmware and leave you one more step on your way to unlocking.

Step 8

Now its time to patch the firmware. Thanks to gray for finding these patches, this required some very complicated reversing. First, you need to extract the firmware from your nor dump. The range you need is 0×20000-0×304000. Save this file as “nor”. The patches you need to apply are as follows. These are offsets from the begininning of the file to saved as “nor”. Choose your version, and patch.
3.12: (213740): 04 00 a0 e1 -> 00 00 a0 e3
3.14: (215148): 04 00 a0 e1 -> 00 00 a0 e3
Resave the file nor, you’ll need it soon…

Step 9

The final tool is iUnlocker. This tool uploads a small program, “testcode.bb”, to the baseband using the bootrom exploit. This program needs to be in a dir with “nor”, the file you obtained in the last step. You need to have the switch on when running this program. This will download and run the code in “testcode.bb” Then the program will stop and ask to to turn off the switch. Do so. You type any character then hit enter. The nor download starts right away. When the counter reaches 0×2E4000, it is done. Run “bbupdater -v”. Hopefully it will return the xgendata. If is does, the nor upload was successful.

Step 10: The Last One

minicom into /dev/tty.baseband. If you already used up your attempt counter, the phone should already be unlocked. If not just run ‘AT+CLCK=”PN”,0,”00000000″. That will unlock the phone for sure. Run ‘AT+CLCK=”PN”,2′. It should finally return 0!!!
Your phone is now unlocked. Exit minicom and copy the CommCenter plist back to its place. Reboot. iASign. And enjoy your unlocked iPhone.

C#mon - hire this talent- apple!

Courtesy of George Hotz

August 24th, 2007 | Category: Sebastian Foss | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL