Just installed the iPhone OS 3.0 GM seed file onto my iPhone 3G from my iMac. I’m part of the iPhone Developers program so the ‘seed’ means ‘pre-release’, as the official update isn’t due until the 17th June or so. So slightly excited and nervous just in case something went wrong.

So, initially all went well. Process was something like this…

1. Download the .dmg disk image
2. Open it to view the .ipsw file
3. Fire up iTunes, select the iPhone
4. VERY IMPORTANT: **Backup the phone** You may need the backup data later!!!
5. Option-click (alt-click) the ‘restore’ button
6. In the dialogue box, locate the .ipsw file
7. Wait for it to do its thing and restart the phone
8. Restarted iTunes… PROBLEM!!

The iPhone had a ‘connect to iTunes’ diagram on it’s screen and wouldn’t go any further. Like so…

Restarted iTunes then it threw an error…

“We could not complete your iTunes Store request. An unknown error occurred (-9807).”

This can happen with the iTunes store and keychain errors, so I repaired my keychain. No change to the error though.

The iPhone was visible intermittently in iTunes but had no options or content listed under the icon, even right-clicking it just displayed ‘Eject’. Tried restarting both Mac and iPhone. No joy.

Finally tracked it down to a permissions thing. Luckily, I had a few user accounts set up on my iMac, so I logged out of mine and into another. If you don’t have them, then set one up from the System Preferences/Accounts panel. Fired up iTunes in the other account and the iPhone sprang to life! Yay!

Then I logged into the main user account again, fired up iTunes again and everything worked.

I then noticed my data hadn’t actually migrated back during the update (apps, prefs, photos etc.). Thank god for that backup I just did (see above). So I then restored to the backup. This restores the data, not the OS, so I still have OS 3.0 etc.

I then had to manually synced the Applications back (as I had them set to manually sync anyway) and it finally looks like it was supposed to!

Had a quick play and all my emails are there, text messages intact, contacts, ringtones, apps etc. Had to move my apps around the screen manually to tidy them up but apart from that all good.

Hopefully this won’t happen to the public release but hope this helps if you do need it.

:: STOP PRESS ::

Just found this entry that may help. If you’ve got Little Snitch running on your Mac, you may be seconds away from the answer!