andy's nerd blog » itunes

Fix for iTunes error 1600 when restoring 3.1.3 to 3GS

Andy Assareh — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 23:23:03 +0000

Sometimes when trying to restore a custom firmware to an iPhone using iTunes you get hit with an error 1600. There are a variety of causes but in my particular case, I screwed up the phone trying to change fonts and it wouldn’t boot. I turned to google and found about a million threads with various suggestions on how to make it go away. But none of them worked for me.

(There is a handy tool called iReb that will fix this issue for iPhone 2G and 3G, but it doesn’t work for the 3GS.)

And of course Apple stopped signing all previous firmware versions and restoring to official 3.1.3 would update the baseband, making it *currently* un-jailbreakable and unlockable. So, what’s one to do..I tried everything! Well, almost everything…

I was desperate and thought of one last thing to try. I put the phone in DFU mode and started an official 3.1.3 restore. It extracted the software and went to “preparing iPhone for restore.” At this point I saw an Apple logo on the phone. More waiting, and then I saw an empty progress bar appear on the phone. I continued waiting through the “preparing iPhone for restore” stage and the progress bar remained empty. Finally, after what seemed like several minutes the status changed to “waiting for iPhone.” I immediately unplugged the USB cable. The phone then rebooted into Recovery mode (or I rebooted it, don’t recall) but either way I knew that this was a step forward because I couldn’t even get it into Recovery mode before. At this point I force quit iTunes, restarted iTunes, and was able to restore my custom firmware!

The restore completed successfully and my baseband was not updated. Great success! Now I’m not sure if this has been attempted before but I haven’t seen any mention of this anywhere on the interwebz. Try at your own risk of course, but if you need this you’re probably desperate anyway. In that case, hope this helps. At the time of this writing I’ve used this method twice, both with iTunes 9.0.3, once on a Mac and once on Windows. Yes, I’ve been screwing with my phone quite a bit.

iPhone headphones can control iTunes! Probably doesn’t work with all Mac’s as the tip suggests but it...
Fixing iTunes keeps asking about incoming network connections For users of iTunes and the Leopard or Snow Leopard built-in firewall.....

iPhone headphones can control iTunes!

Andy Assareh — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 18:03:01 +0000

Probably doesn’t work with all Mac’s as the tip suggests but it works with my unibody MacBook Pro. So cool!

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Fixing iTunes keeps asking about incoming network connections

Andy Assareh — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 21:51:04 +0000

For users of iTunes and the Leopard or Snow Leopard built-in firewall.. Bug that causes iTunes to prompt Allow or Deny incoming connections every single time you start the app. So annoying! Here’s an easy fix:

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Fixing Trash Problems in Mac OS Second time in two months that I’ve had a problem with my...
Fixing “Copy Address” in Snow Leopard Mail.app For some strange reason Apple changed the way Mail.app copies email addresses...
Catching up on song ratings in iTunes In preparation for getting an iPod I should probably start rating my...

Properly Moving Your iTunes Library

Andy Assareh — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 20:45:31 +0000

Comprehensive guide on properly moving your iTunes Library. Since I’m trying to get by with an 80GB SSD I decided to move most of my library to my external disk.

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iTunes sharing with Xbox! I had no idea this was implemented in XBMC, but apparently I...
Fixing iTunes keeps asking about incoming network connections For users of iTunes and the Leopard or Snow Leopard built-in firewall.....

Catching up on song ratings in iTunes

Andy Assareh — Sat, 28 Aug 2004 11:16:00 +0000

In preparation for getting an iPod I should probably start rating my songs in iTunes. For some reason the idea of rating songs never caught on with me. But if I’m carrying around a music player with 2000 songs on it, it might be nice to have a 5-star playlist.

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Fixing iTunes keeps asking about incoming network connections For users of iTunes and the Leopard or Snow Leopard built-in firewall.....

iTunes sharing with Xbox!

Andy Assareh — Tue, 17 Aug 2004 18:24:00 +0000

I had no idea this was implemented in XBMC, but apparently I will be able to access my shared iTunes library from the Xbox. Sweet.

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Properly Moving Your iTunes Library Comprehensive guide on properly moving your iTunes Library. Since I’m trying to...
Paydirt, baby! 480p DVD on Xbox Finally! A hex edit to enable progressive scan DVD playback in the...
Playing TS files on Xbox Using XBMC for transport stream playback is an area of high interest...

iTunes on your Desktop

Andy Assareh — Sat, 14 Aug 2004 05:35:00 +0000

This looks pretty sweet. It’s a hovering song title window so you can hide iTunes but still see what song is playing. As if being able to HEAR the song isn’t enough…but it does look cool.

Update: It was too much trouble to get it working. I ended up using a *much* better solution, Synergy.

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