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Dual-boot your iPhone with multiple firmware versions!

By: , IntoMobile
Monday, March 17th, 2008 at 5:43 PM

iPhone dual-bootTalk about cool.

We’ve all heard of dual-booting desktop and laptop computers with mutiple OS’s. There’s nothing cool about dual-booting on desktop computers – heck, I used to triple boot my MacBook Pro with Mac OS X, Windows XP, and Windows Vista. But, what about dual-booting your iPhone?

iPhone developer/hacker extraordinaire, Jonathan “NerveGas” Zdziarski, has posted detailed instructions for installing and booting from multiple OS’s (firmwares) on the iPhone. The method allows for the installation of, say, both the iPhone v1.1.4 firmware and iPhone v1.1.1 firmware simultaneously. Cool indeed.

The instructions, according to NerveGas, will

“walk you through a sample jailbreak scenario with 1.1.4, using 1.1.1, to show you what I mean. To do this, you will carve out a new partition on the iPhone and install version 1.1.1 on it. You’ll then upgrade the iPhone to v1.1.4, which will leave the new partition intact. You can then dual-boot the iPhone, allowing you to mount 1.1.4’s partition using the 1.1.1 partition.”

Dual-booting the iPhone could prove to be useful as a way to run both official iPhone applications made with the official iPhone SDK  and unofficial iPhone applications used with the iPhone jailbreak solution. The iPhone v2.0 firmware that’s expected to work with these official iPhone SDK-based application could be dual-booted with earlier iPhone firmwares that are compatible with older jailbreak applications.

While everyone else is dual-booting their desktops, I’ll be dual-booting my iPhone…

Zdziarski

[Via: iPhone Atlas]

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About The Author

Will Park

Will hails from The City of Angels - Los Angeles, California. He spends his time playing with his numerous gadgets and looking forward to seeing what future holds for mobile technology. An avid promoter of a fully "digital" life, he promotes the widespread adoption of truly mobile, paper-less living. He dreams of the day when he can go completely digital. No more snail mail, paper receipts, bound books, notepads/spiral notebooks, credit cards, hard currency. He's a digital warrior - fighting for the converged life. He is an idealist and a realist - he has a perfect view of what the world should be but knows that the world is not perfect. Can we ever hope to see Will's dream become reality? We'll see...

  • JonnyBruha

    Oh, you’ve never used Linux. That’s why you like the iPhone.

    I can hear the ladies swooning now. “Oooh! Did you just boot 1.1.3?! I thought you were running 1.1.4?! Your iPhone is soooo cool! Take me!”

    For you own sake, I think you should rethink what you just said. You just compared dual booting full featured computer operating systems with different firmware versions of a mobile device. When your iPhone comes even remotely close to being as functional as ANY desktop, or can even be used without a desktop as a REQUIREMENT for most of its tasks, then you might have an once of credibility.

  • Brandon

    To JonnyBruha a desktop isn’t required for most tasks on the iPhone. Actually if I didn’t have to unlock my iPhone I don’t think I would need a computer at all.