What to do when your iPad jailbreak fails
As I mentioned before I have 60 iPads at work that I have set about getting jailbroken and locked down. The first batch I was going to do was 20 of them. As I set about getting them done I figured out a system that was working very well. I got 8 iPads done without any issues. Then came the ninth one. Everything was going according to plan until I got to the very last step.
As I told you in this post jailbreaking is a pretty simple process. The program does all the work until it tells you to unlock your iPad and start up a new shortcut it placed on your home screen. That shortcut finishes out the jailbreak process. That is where I got stuck. The whole jailbreak process can take a long time if you have a lot of data on your iPad. Part of the jailbreaking process is a complete backup and restore. Since I am working with basically empty iPads, it was only taking a few minutes to actually do the jailbreak. After I let this one sit for about 25 minutes, I realized it wasn’t going to finish. It wouldn’t complete the last step.
I retried a couple different times, and it kept getting stuck. I did some Google searching and found a few helpful threads, but nothing that actually worked. At some point while I was trying different things I got it to work. At the time I really didn’t know exactly what I did to fix it. Then the 14th iPad got stuck at the same point, and the 17th one got stuck as well. By that third one that got stuck I figured out exactly how to finish it, and did it on the first try. That’s what I want to explain to you today.
Three iPads out of the 20 that I have jailbroken so far is a 15% stuck rate. I have no idea if that is a normal rate, and 20 is a pretty small number to know for sure, but 15% is a decent chance that if you decide to jailbreak your iPad, you might have a problem. If you do, the fix is pretty simple. Here’s what you do:
- First close down Absinthe and open up iTunes. When your iPad shows up in iTunes, do a factory restore. Make sure you do a backup.
- When the restore is complete, make sure you don’t do anything on your iPad yet.
- Close iTunes and reopen Absinthe.
- Run Absinthe to jailbreak your iPad.
- After the final step completes your iPad should reboot and the Absinthe shortcut should disappear from your home screen.
- When it is all said and done, you can then restore all your data using iTunes.
