Restore an iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch Without Power Button

So I felt the need to document this journal as part of my “techie-side-of-life”. The thing is, it was rather funny and at the same time, challenging how I was able to pull off my dilemma on troubleshooting an iDevice. (Skip to the procedure below if you’re not in the mood to read my hilarious story, lol!)

I took a glance at my friend’s jailbroken iTouch 3G to see what apps she has. I noticed that her lockscreen theme looked off with the Weather Elements as the wallpaper. So I tried to install a Winterboard theme called Slider Remover from Modmyi. So after respringing the device, indeed the lock slider thingy disappeared, but wait — including the one from Weather Elements!? And I thought anxiously, “What happened? This can’t be serious, I can’t unlock the iTouch!”

At first, I calmed down and tried to think about my quick fix — restart the device. But, the power button was completely broken, I began to get worried 100x more than earlier. So I swiped the status bar to show SBSettings, to choose safe mode. Voila, it wasn’t installed! I told my friend about what happened, good thing she also remained calm.

The last option was to restore with iTunes. Of course, my friend and I made a backup and transfer of app purchases. She clicked on “Restore”, iTunes detected its iOS wasn’t the latest so we waited for it to finish downloading. Unfortunately, our ISP had a poor connection, hence, it got disconnected.

I thought of other possible solutions so I opened the iPod’s folders and access some files perhaps to delete/modify them. Due to my panic and desperate mode, I asked Google how to install SBSettings without Cydia. I landed on a forum, which posted a link to the file using iFunbox to copy the file. And so I did the instruction, rebooted, only to find out it made the status bar disappear! Here’s more, the problem got even worse the moment I accessed iTunes again — it suddenly showed an unknown error ‘0xE8000022’. I Googled again for this error hoping for possible fixes but to no avail.

How do you fix an iPod touch with a broken power button, a missing lockscreen-slider, no SBSettings installed and iTunes cannot connect the device? After several days of extensive research, I never knew how easy it was.

Follow the procedure as follows:

1. Google and download the original and latest iOS firmware for your iDevice. (Ex: “iPod touch 3G 5.1.1”)

2. Wait for your device to completely shut off. Yes, you need to drain its juice for it to turn off (Thanks, Bernardo for asking about this!).

3. Once it’s off, hold the Home button.

4. While holding, connect the USB cable to your computer.

5. Your iDevice should now turn it on. Keep holding the Home button.

6. The “Connect to iTunes” mode should show up. You’re now in recovery mode.

7. Open iTunes. It should prompt you to restore your device.

8. Open the ipsw firmware file you downloaded and proceed with the next instructions.

Congratulations! You now have a freshly restored iDevice. You may now proceed with your jailbreaking procedure.

And by the way, once jailbroken, never forget to install SBSettings.