iFunBox Development

Limitations:
Uploading music and movie to iPhone is now disabled on devices with firmware 2.x.

Highlight:
Thumbnail previewing helps a lot for wallpaper management.
It is also integrated in all other folders including camera folder. Now it is more easy to seletively delete photos in the camera and replace resource images in Applications.

We received many complains that iTunes report “Cannot read the content …” and asks for restoring after uploading video or song using iFunbox. The cause of this problem is that Apple has special hashing checking in iTunes which is not well handled by iFunbox. We apologize for that and will fix the problem in the next release.

Situation
0. For all iPhones and iPod Touch, iTunes will report “Cannot read the content …” and asks for restoring after uploading some media file using iFunbox due to the hashing checking in iTunes.
1. For iPhones and iPod Touch with FW 1.1.x, the uploaded songs/movies will be recognized by iPod on the device and can be played. In FW 1.1.x, the device doesn’t check the hashing.
2. For iPhones and iPod Touch with FW 2.x.x, the uploaded songs/movies will NOT be recognized due to the hashing checking on the device.
3. For other models of iPods (Classic, Video, Shuffle and etc), iTunes will not ask for restoring and just simply remove the media files uploaded by iFunbox. For devices produced before 2007 (not exactly), the uploaded media files will be recognized and can be played. However for newest devices, the uploaded media files can NOT be played. I guess, it is also due to hashing checking.

Do NOT follow iTunes
Though iTunes report ”Cannot read the content …” and asks for restoring, I believe no one would like to do that. iTunes force you update the firmware along with restoring and after restoring all user data will be delete including installed 3rd-party apps, data in general storage, contact list, SMS history. Also you will need to jailbreak after restoring.

Rescue the relationship with iTunes.
Here we provide steps to cheat iTunes that the device has been restored by deleting “iTunes_Control” folder. so that iTunes will initialize the media database (iTunesDB). The way we provided here keeps all user data unchanged except songs and movies. 3rd-party apps, data in general storage, contact list, SMS history will be preserved after process. Also you don’t need to jailbreak again.
We test the steps on iPhone 2G, FW1.1.4 and iTunes 8.0. Thanks Gaz, he tested the steps on iPhone 3G and iTunes 7.1.

0. Close iPod application on iPhone, stop music playing.
Close iTunes, You must close iTunes!!! Then open iFunBox.

1. Backup media files. (Optional)
if you don’t care, just skip.

2. Backup contact list and SMS. (Optional)
Though the following steps will not erase those information, I’d like to have those things backuped just in case.
Contact List: //var/mobile/Library/AddressBook
SMS: //var/mobile/Library/SMS

3. Browse the [Raw File System], Delete the folder iTunes_Control Located in “//var/mobile/Media/iTunes_Control”

4. Close iFunbox and then open iTunes for setup.
Wait seconds for iTunes searching for the connected iPhone.
Now iTunes will ask you to setup instead of restoring it, after the iTunes_Control folder was deleted.
Choose [Set up as an New Phone] and uncheck all sync options, iTunes will initialize an empty media database. Thus, the iTunes_Control folder and subfolders will be created. Other user data such as 3rd-party apps, data in general storage, contact list and SMS histroy keep unchanged.
Choose [Restore from backup of], the contact list and SMS history will be overwritten to the state as backup.
In this step, my choice is [Set up as an New Phone], then click [Continue]. Uncheck the automatically sync then click [Done].

Then iTunes takes a long time for sync and finally we have iTunes back.

Many users reported iFunBox crashes after iTunes was updated to v8.0. We found the USB communication runtime library (iTunesMobileDevice.dll) was changed which cause iFunBox failure. The problem has been fixed in the newly released iFunBox v0.6.199.35.

More precisely, the memory layout of the structure am_device was extended 105bytes. The structure is used in many fundamental call for communicating with iPhone via USB port. Though the meaning of these addtional bytes is not clear to us, fortunately we don’t need to know that. The structure is created by the runtime library and feeded to other calls.

The updated am_device structure is defined as:
struct am_device {
unsigned char unknown0[16]; /* 0 - zero */
unsigned int device_id; /* 16 */
unsigned int product_id; /* 20 - set to AMD_IPHONE_PRODUCT_ID */
char *serial; /* 24 - set to AMD_IPHONE_SERIAL */
unsigned int unknown1; /* 28 */
unsigned char unknown2[4]; /* 32 */
unsigned int lockdown_conn; /* 36 */
unsigned char unknown3[8]; /* 40 */
unsigned char unknown4[6*16+1]; // + in iTunes 8.0, by iFunbox.dev
unsigned char padding[8]; // + in iTunes 8.0, by iFunbox.dev
};


Crash dump file (*.dmp) will appear when the program crashes. Sending us the crash dump can help us improve the i-FunBox.

– iFunBox Dev Team ( ifunbox.dev@gmail.com )