Apple has your unlocked iPhone in their crosshairs. What do you do? This method in no way guarantees that your iPhone will survive the update after being unlocked. If you’re risk adverse, you may want to wait a day or two for these instructions to get debugged. And be aware there may be a lock/unlock limit set by hardware.

The IMEI errors seems to be unrelated to unlock method–I’m hearing from people who used pretty much each of the unlock scenarios. Some people have simply re-unlocked and are using their phones without problem but can’t re-lock, reversing the unlock.

Important note: depending on the method of unlocking, some people are experiencing munged IMEI’s. Looking into this! “Delayed Green” says that he saw this “Incorrect SIM” error in the early unlock days and that he knows of no way to fix the problem. Things to try: a different SIM, removing the SIM, powering down and back on, making sure the radio is working.

I’m hearing about both success reports and problems. If you haven’t tried relocking yet, do yourself a favor and just wait until we figure out why some relocks are going wrong. Here’s yet another link to check out.Following are steps to relock iphone.

• (Take out your SIM from your iPhone.)–Still checking on this step.
• Download the 1.0.2 firmware to your computer and unzip it. It uses a .ipsw extension but your unzip program should still work. Change the extension if you have to.
• Extract the ramdisk as such: dd if=009-7698-4.dmg of=ramdisk.dmg bs=512 skip=4 conv=sync
• Mount the extracted ramdisk.
• From the ramdisk, copy /usr/local/bin/bbupdater, /usr/local/standalone/firmware/ICE03.14.08_G.eep, and /usr/local/standalone/firmware/ICE03.14.08_G.fls to your iPhone. Place these into a folder on the OS partition (such as /bbupdate) and not into a folder on /var/root. The /var/root partition is set noexec and you cannot run programs from there.
• Disable com.apple.CommCenter.plist–either using UIctl or launchctl: launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.CommCenter.plist
• On the iPhone, navigate to the folder where you stored bbupdater and the eep and fls files.
• Run bbupdater as such: ./bbupdater -f *.fls -e *.eep
• Reload comm center: launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.CommCenter.plist
• Reactivate with your favorite AT&T SIM. I personally like using iASign.

Thanks to Shaun T. Erickson and Kai Cherry

“What about restore?” — Unlocks survive restore. It’s a different part of your phone.

“Will this affect Jailbreak or 3rd party apps?” — No but you still may have to restore before the next firmware update.

“Will the next firmware update lock me out from jailbreak and 3rd party apps?” — We have to see but…likely yes.

“Do I have to update my iPhone when the next firmware is released?” — No. But then you’re kind of sticking your iPhone into a time warp. Everything else will change but not your iPhone. And I don’t see there being a parallel development effort on the part of hackers.

From http://www.tuaw.com/2007/09/24/how-to-relock-your-iphone-before-the-firmware-update/

Posted on September 24th, 2007 by admin
Filed under: Unlock iPhone