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I jailbroke and unlocked my 3GS (4.1, baseband 06.15.00) a few months ago to use it in another country. However, my 2-year German contract is up and I could ask my former carrier to ask Apple for the official unlock. Would this work on a jailbroken/unlocked phone? I want to upgrade to IOS 5 without needed to jailbreak to unlock the phone again (I don't use jailbroken apps, really, just used it for the unlock).

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Will the official unlock work if I am able to restore to factory settings but the baseband remains 06.15.00? Can I restore in iTunes because I am still on 4.1 with this baseband? – dashes Jan 4 '12 at 14:01
By now it is possible to down-grade your baseband - at least for the iPhone 3G and 3GS (unfortunately not 4/S) - from the iPad's 06.15 to 05.13.04 (un-lockable) thanks to the great work of the iPhone Dev Team: See this post on their blog. And with that you should be able to do a full restore and get the official unlock with the newest iOS and baseband. – iolsmit Jul 5 '12 at 0:47

2 Answers

up vote 1 down vote

Return your phone to its standard state, so ios4.1 and then yes, you can ask the carrier to request unlock from Apple.

The unlock works by changing a database entry for your UDID on Apple servers and therefore whether or not it's jailbroken should make little difference. With that said, to be sure it's all worked ( and because you are planning to) taking it back to a standard OS install would make sense.

Hope this helps.

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Do you mean complete restore? I am afraid that if I do this, I will brick my phone – dashes Jan 4 '12 at 10:15
How will this process "brick" your phone? :) – Graeme Hutchison Jan 4 '12 at 10:18
You will have to perform a complete restore for the official unluck. – iolsmit Jan 4 '12 at 10:18
Ok - not brick, but afraid if I restore and then official unlock doesn't come through as expected that I won't be able to use it with my sim (as I don't have a contract with my old carrier anymore) – dashes Jan 4 '12 at 10:24
Will complete restore change my baseband back to something else from 06.15.00? – dashes Jan 4 '12 at 11:34
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up vote 1 down vote

You'll need to restore the firmware using one of the jailbreak applications. Pwnagetool, redSn0w, etc.

The reason is the 6.15 firmware is from the iPad and it's version is higher than what is in the normal 3GS firmware. iTunes will see this phone is different than what it expects and throw an error (1015, I believe).

As the unlock developers have stressed, repeatedly, the custom 6.15 firmware is a one way deal. Once you do this you can't go back to the normal firmware anymore. To update in the future you'll have to continue creating custom firmwares, the factory firmware simply won't work anymore.

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Wait, so can I restore or not? – dashes Jan 4 '12 at 13:43
You'll need to do it with the jailbreak. From now on the phone can only be restored/updated with the jailbreak. – Joe Chin Jan 4 '12 at 15:24

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