I had an iPhone 3GS jailbroken and running 5.0.1. Then the AT&T unlock dropped, and I wanted that. (More than I wanted jailbreaking in fact.)

I backed up my phone by right clicking on it in iTunes (10.5; have since upgraded to the latest) and selecting "Back up." Then I went ahead with the restore, which is how the unlock happens. Upgrade to 5.1 is successful, restore is successful.

Restarts and makes it to the lock screen with my wallpaper and everything and with the camera icon inline with the slider bar. After about 5 seconds (it will respond normally for at least part of that brief time, but starting the camera, dropping me to my first page of apps, etc.), the screen goes black and the little circle spinner thing that you see on iPhone shutdown appear and spins briefly. Then, after about 5 seconds again, I go back to the lock screen.

It's stuck in this loop indefinitely. The only way to break it is to hard power off (power+home for 15ish sec) and start up in restore mode.

If I just restore to factory settings and setup as a new phone, all works fine except that I'm missing all my config and data. I can't get back to 5.0.1 because I foolishly didn't save my shsh blobs (same process worked flawlessly on my other 3GS, didn't think I'd need 'em.) I've done a lot of googling and experimenting to no avail. Any ideas?

1. Is the possibly jailbreak interfering here in moving from JB 5.0.1 to non-JB 5.1?
2. Any suggestions on how to make the restore work?
3. I have the backup from before the problems began. Can I somehow manually restore pieces and parts?
4. I can see the phone and sync it in iTunes even while in the loop, though the phone itself is unusable. Can I use this to somehow extract my settings/contacts/etc.?

#1 concern is contacts, then app settings (e.g., angry birds level, etc.).

Thanks in advance...

Lost in Space

Apple servers are no longer allowing the restore to a firmware that old, if you not saved your bloobs, you are out of luck.

Originally Posted by Metallo

1. Is the possibly jailbreak interfering here in moving from JB 5.0.1 to non-JB 5.1?
2. Any suggestions on how to make the restore work?
3. I have the backup from before the problems began. Can I somehow manually restore pieces and parts?
4. I can see the phone and sync it in iTunes even while in the loop, though the phone itself is unusable. Can I use this to somehow extract my settings/contacts/etc.?

1. Not really, no. The jailbreak disappears during the restore process as it's contained in the software you're replacing.
2. If the restore itself doesn't work through iTunes, there isn't much you can do unless you can identify the suspect data. The good news is that using the iphone backup and any of a number of free backup extractor programs, you can pull the data (including app data) out of the backup and manually migrate it to the new phone. Yes, it's a pain in the butt and it's a manual process, but it will get your data to the new phone successfully.
3. You can, but it's not worth the effort to do it this way. iTunes will only restore a full backup and if you start mixing files between backups you can make the situation worse. It's better to identify the data you need, extract from the backup, then manually migrate after restore using SCP or iDisk/etc.
4. If the phone boots up and SSH is running, you can pull the actual SQLite database that houses your contacts off the phone. As I recall, the database is located in /var/mobile/Library/AddressBook and it's called AddressBook.db. You can put this phone in the same location on any other phone of the same version to overwrite the contacts with the contents of the file.

So, with regard to your concerns:

1) Yes, you can recover contacts so long as you can access the filesystem of the phone with SSH or with an AFC2 browser (DiskAid, iPhoneBrowser, iFunBox, etc.)
2) Yes, you should be able to recover the app data (though it may be a manual process of pulling data from backup and placing onto new phone in proper location) even if you can't successfully restore from backup.