So last night a good friend of mine came over with an iPhone dilemma.. Stuck with iOS5 and a need downgrade.. We tried various solutions with non working completely. We then decided to try and jailbreak the device, to try and work around the issue. Knowing iOS5 jailbreaks are still in there very early stages we knew this would be tethered, but accepted its fate and carried on anyway.. The jailbreak went without a hitch, using RedSn0w all looked well! Apart from the fact it still didnt resolve the issue and now we were stuck with a tethered boot device for no reason at all.
On we went trying to un-break the device, using my MacBook pro, and as many ipsw’s as we could find.. All of which failed, with pretty much every error message found in iTunes. The most common one being “This iPhone is not eligible..” this proved to be the most persistent. Even standing when we tried to do the stock iOS5 install..
However.. The fix wasn’t as google suggested, it had nothing to do with the hosts file.. An TinyUmberella couldn’t help.. So I booted up my Windows 7 VM, installed iTunes 10.5 and straight away it restored the iOS ipsw without any error messages or questions asked!!!
Now, I’m not sure if it was OS X lion, or the fact I’d been messing with TinyUmberella all night long, but one things for sure.. The VM fixed it.. An I didn’t even have to touch my hosts file!
So my tip of the day is.. If iTunes doesn’t want to help, try another machine be it physical or virtual, before spending 4 hours trying to figure out why!!