If you are the owner of an iPhone or know your gadgets, you will know that jailbreaking your iPhone can mean you open your device so you can use it without Apple’s inbuilt restrictions and even use it on another mobile network. Apple recently released two firmware updates for their iPhone and iPod Touch devices, with the newest firmware 3.1.2 fixing many bugs brought by previous interactions.
This update meant that a lot of jailbroken iPhone users lost their carrier unlocks and their jailbroken firmware, resulting in them losing the ability to run custom apps and much more. Until last week, there wasn’t an easy way to get these customisations back but after a very timely release from the GeoHot team, it is now possible to jailbreak your Apple device and very quickly too.
The following article explains how to unlock your iPod 3G/3GS and iPod Touch on a Windows machine. This will not unlock your iPhone to work on other mobile carriers and it is advised to wait until the PwnageTool is released by the iPhone Dev Team before upgrading your iPhone from 3.0 or 3.1.
Please Note: This tutorial is for informative purposes only and will void your warranty. We cannot be held accountable for any damage caused to your device.
1. Download Blackra1n
The first part is simple, navigate your favourite browser to blackra1n.com and click the little Windows icon at the bottom (to reiterate, this is for Windows machines only).
Save this file to your Desktop or the root drive of your computer (normally your C:\ drive).
2. Running Blackra1n
Once saved, you will need to run the application. Before doing so make sure that your device is plugged into the machine you are using and that it is switched on.
Some users have remarked that having some of the iTunes processes running on their machine stopped the jailbreaking process from completing. To stop this happening, users have suggested killing the following processes from the Task Manager before running the Blackra1n application:
- iTunesHelper
- iPodService
- mDNRSResponder
Some users have also killed the AppleMobileDevice and some haven’t. If you experience errors, try with and without this process running.
Double click the Blackra1n application and then click “make it ra1n”.
This will attempt to put your phone into recovery mode:
Once it has done this, it should then change the screen of your phone. Instead of seeing the Apple logo, you should see the following image on your device:
This will change the Blackra1n status to the following:
Before waiting for a complete reboot:
Once this has all finished, you will be presented with the following screen:
And you are all done! Once your device restarts, there will be a new app on your iPhone called “Blackra1n”. Run this and select that you want to install Cydia. This is the app of choice to download jailbroken apps and personalise your iPhone.
Cydia will then reside on your iPhone once more, ready for you to completely kit out your device.
Conclusion
This is a relatively pain free and easy way to jailbreak your iPhone.
If you complete the following steps and are presented with a graphic depicting a USB Cable and an iTunes logo, do not panic, simply hard reboot (hold the power and home buttons for about 8 seconds) and restart the device.
It took a few attempts to complete these steps so do not dismay. You may need to temporarily disable your antivirus and firewall applications should you still have problems.
