I picked up an iPhone 4S yesterday. The plan was to give my current iPhone 4 to my wife (she’s upgrading from a Blackberry Torch)
Easy: go to AT&T store, get my new phone. They put a new SIM card in the iPhone 4, with her number (the Blackberry uses a standard SIM, iPhone 4 uses Micro SIM)
Then I reset her phone, and try to set it up. However, I run into problem, due to the fact that I was running a beta of iOS 5 on it: it doesn’t recognize the phone as provisioned for development. Even though it had been, and it is the same phone, apparently with a new SIM it is seen as a different device.
So I need to reset it, not only to get it working, but so it can be bumped up to release of iOS 5; no need for my wife’s phone to use the developer release.
First, put phone into DFU mode.
Hooking it up to my computer and attempted to reset resulted in an error message after running the restore. At first, I thought it was iTunes: I was running the beta of iTunes 10.5, which apparently expired yesterday. So I download latest version, and try again – it tells me the phone isn’t authorized for that version (it was trying to restore to iOS 4.3.5). I believe the restore checks with Apple to confirm the OS (it’s signed), and with the release of 5, Apple was revoking older versions.
The key: you need to update to iOS 5, not an older version. This requires downloading the iOS 5 update manually, rather than using iTunes/iPhone to do it (since you’re phone is in DFU mode).
- download it from Apple’s servers – here’s a list (Make sure you download the correct version for your device)
- in DFU mode, with iPhone connected to USB, hold Alt (Mac OSX) or Shift (Windows) key and click Restore while key is held (in iTunes, select your phone > Summary tab) – it will then prompt you for the location of the IPSW file you downloaded
- Should be able to update your phone correctly at this point, restoring to clean iOS 5
