How to Restore iPhone After Jailbreak

A lot of people, having never jailbroken or unlocked their phone before, want to know if they can restore it to the way it previously was before it was jailbroken or unlocked before they set about jailbreaking or unlocking their iPhone–understandable, since you paid a good amount of money for it and don’t want to risk ‘bricking’ it. It’s quite possible to completely reset your iPhone to its prior state before it was jailbroken/unlocked because everything that you changed was in the software, not the hardware, therefore making everything you did completely reversible. Here’s how to do it:


Before we begin you should know that initially all your personal data from your iPhone, such as songs, photos, contacts, videos, calendar information, and other such data will be deleted and your iPhone will go back to it’s factory default settings. Now, I know this sounds bad but I’m going to show you how to save all your personal data so that what you can do is simply recover it from backup after you’ve restored your iPhone, no biggie. Here we go.

1. Connect your iPhone to your computer and select it from the list of devices in iTunes. If things have really gone terribly wrong while jailbreaking/unlocking your iPhone and it’s not detected by iTunes then you will need to put it in DFU (Device Firmware Upgrade) mode. Here’s how to do that:
   • Connect your iPhone to your computer.
   • Turn the iPhone off.
   • Hold the power and home buttons simultaneously for 10 seconds.

   
   

   • Release the power buton but keep holding home until the computer recognizes a USB device.
   • A few seconds later iTunes should detect your iPhone and you may continue as outlined below.




2. iTunes will now ask you if you would like to make a backup of your iPhone before restoring. Select Backup.




3. After it’s finished backing everything up, select the Restore option when iTunes prompts you.




4. Once the restore process is finished, your iPhone should automatically restart and the Apple logo will appear while booting up.




5. After the restore is complete and your iPhone is rebooting you will see the “Connect to Activate” screen. Now, remember that you need to continue to keep your iPhone connected to complete activation.




6. The last step is to restore all your settings and data either from a backup or to set it up as a “new iPhone”. Now you just select the date of your backup that you want to restore from. And remember, you can always follow the above procedure to restore from a backup at a later date if you wish. In the Summary Tab, click the ‘Restore’ button.

That’s it. You’re finished. Congratulations, and try not to mess up your iPhone too badly again, ok?