It is a known fact that if an iDevice Jailbreak user mess up with restoring of his or her iDevice for long or carelessly then iTunes / Apple will in turn mess up with him. This is my story and how i came to a new discovery as a result of frustration. I am a proud owner of an iphone 3gs and iphone 4. They were both unlocked throught ultrasnow not knowing that evasion only supports jailbreak for fully activated iDevices i mistakenly restore both devices to iOS 6.1.2 Unlockily for me my iPhone 3gs has a new bootrom so and redsn0w has no support for iOS 6.1 as i speak so the only viable option i had was to revert back to myprevious iOS i downloaded iOS 6.1.1 but i couldn’t restore to it (i got error 3194) because apple has stopped signing it. The only option left for was is to restore to iOS 4.1 because apple is still subscribing to it . but something went wrong as i got error 1015
When i visited apple support page i was made to realized that error 1015 occurred with users who are trying to downgrade, upgrade or restore, their firmware on their iPhone 4S, 4, 3gs – iPod Touch 3G, 4G – iPad 3, 2, 1 on any iOS 4.x or iOS 5.x.
So you have an iPhone 4 or iPhone 3GS (New Bootrom), running iOS 4.0.1, with SHSH blobs saved on Cydia, and you want to restore your iPhone again to iOS 4.0.1. Now that Apple has stopped signing iOS 4.0.1, you wont be able to restore your iPhone 4 on iOS 4.0.1 by simply pointing iTunes to iOS 4.0.1 ipsw file. Because if you do so, iTunes will throw an error: “ the iPhone “iPhone” could not be restored. An unknown error occured (1015) .
Now to fix this error, we have several people who says you shuold use tinyumbrella, recboot e.t.c but while am not condemning all this softwares, i will love to tell you hear that you may not need them to fix this recovery error as long as you have downgraded to iOS 4.1, you don’t need any third party software (as in my case none of this software even worked for me)
All you need to do is to download any iOS restore firmware apart from the latest version of the software for your device. In other words, if you have successfully downgrade your iPhone to iOS 4.1 but your device refused to boot and it stuck in the recovery screen as shown above, simply download e.g iOS restore firmware 5.1.1 or any other one. and follow the steps below:
Step 1: Download the required iOS 4.1 ipsw firmware files from here.
Step 2: restore your device to the above iOS firmware
Step 3: after your iphone indicates successfull restore but refused to boot into normal mode but boot into recovery mode instead simply complete the followings:
- Connect your iPhone to your computer.
- Download iPhone restore firmware 4.2 or newer here
- Start iTunes.
- Press and Hold Shift button and now press restore and select the firmware
- The restore process will commence but it will pop-up an error 3194 meaning you cannot downgrade. but this time around you will notice that your iPhone will boot normally.
THE TRICK:
The trick is that if you have installed ipad baseband and you are trying to downgrade to iOS 4.1, the restore process will complete successfully but iTunes will give you error 1015 and will not allow your phone to boot normally. it will be stuck in recovery mode. so if you try to restore to a later or newer firmware apart from the latest firmware you will receive error 3194 which will help kick your device out of recovery mode.
You can there after unlock with ultrasnow or perform a factory unlock so that you can restore to the latest iOS version
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