Hey all,

This might be a bit of a long one - I've spent the last 7 or so hours searching for a solution but all the ones that I've found don't work in my situation.

The back story:

Found a 3g on ebay with a smashed screen; I do quite a bit of work on laptops and want to start reparing iPhones. Seller stated that the phone recieves calls but was unable to test any of the touch because of the screen.
It arrived, I plugged it into a pc to confirm that it functioned but windows wasn't seeing it. Google said that if it wasn't showing up in device manager that I should put it into recovery mode and do a restore.
This made the phone show up in iTunes, it downloaded 4.2.1 but failed with error 1603.
I've read apple's kb article for restoration errors and I've tried everything (3x different machines 2 of which have new iTunes installs, 2 running xp x86 sp3 and 1 running win 7 x32, 2 different cables one of which I know to be good because I use it with my 3gs, disabled all my security software, redownloaded the ipsw and used the ports on the back as opposed to the front panel ones) except to try the restore on a mac.
All of these restores fail with 1603, 1604 and 1611 in both recovery and dfu and there doesn't seem to be any consistancy with the numbering; I've uploaded a 1611 restore log to pastebin: 1611 restore log - Pastebin.com
Since the screen is *very* broken, I figgured that some of the glass fragments might have got in the doc connecter so I gave it a blast with compressed air and tried the restore again. This made the phone vibrate constantly until I turned it off.

I don't know the history of the device - e.g. jailbroken or not other than its locked to 02, so I tried using iRecovery to make it boot - log below:

iRecovery - Recovery Utility
by wEsTbAeR-- and Tom3q

Got USB




=======================================

::

:: iBoot for n82ap, Copyright 2009, Apple Inc.

::

:: BUILD_TAG: iBoot-596.24

::

:: BUILD_STYLE: RELEASE

::

:: USB_SERIAL_NUMBER: CPID:8900 CPRV:30 CPFM:03 SCEP:05 BDID:04 ECID:000000340A0EADF7 IBFL:01 SRNM:[86922Z9XY7H]

::

=======================================



[FTL:MSG] Apple NAND Driver (AND) RO

[NAND] Device ID 0xb614d5ec

[NAND] BANKS_TOTAL 4

[NAND] BLOCKS_PER_BANK 4096

[NAND] PAGES_PER_BANK 524288
[NAND] SECTORS_PER_PAGE 8

[NAND] BYTES_PER_SPARE 128

[FTL:MSG] FIL_Init [OK]

[FTL:MSG] BUF_Init [OK]

[FTL:MSG] FPart Init [OK]

read old style signature 0x43303035 (line:301)

[FTL:MSG] VFL Register [OK]

[FTL:MSG] VFL Init [OK]

[FTL:MSG] VFL_Open [OK]

[FTL:MSG] FTL Register [OK]

[FTL:MSG] FTL_Open [OK]

Boot Failure Count: 15 Panic Fail Count: 0

Entering recovery mode, starting command prompt

] (Recovery) iPhone$ (Recovery) iPhone$ (Recovery) iPhone$ HFSInitPartition: 0x1809a940

It seems to come up with different things sometimes - its mentioned invalid partitions before and Line:301 has been 401 before.

I really don't want this to be a hardware problem - I should be able to return the item, but I'd much rather spend my time getting it working than starting a paypal claim. Does anyone have any ideas? I'm really hoping its a software problem, but except for trying it on a mac, I can't think of anything else that it could be?

Any advice at all would be super.

cheers,

Roze.

Try to restore iOS 3.1.2 instead of iOS 4.2.1
Also are you trying to restore stock or custom IPSWs?

Tried and got 1604 when restoring from recovery and 1611 from dfu. I'm using a stock ipsw - I don't really care about an unlock or anything like that, I just want to get it into a usable state so that I can resell once I fix the glass.

Cheers.

Check the sha1 on the IPSW - the correct SHA1 can be found here:

Firmware - The iPhone Wiki

Try a pwned custom IPSW.

Also.. try the restore via a Mac (sometimes this can help with these type of problems)