How to Fix Endless Reboot Loop Problem on your Jailbroken iPhone, iPad or iPod touch

BY Rounak Jain

Published 7 Feb 2013

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Now that the evasi0n jailbreak for devices running iOS 6.1/6.0 is out, a lot of you folks are experimenting with your iOS devices by installing tweaks, changing themes and doing all sorts of tinkering. Unfortunately  due to the lack of a jailbreak since such a long time, developers haven’t got a lot of time to ensure their tweaks work without any glitches on iOS 6.x, which means that installing certain tweaks could result in undesirable behaviour like crashes or even endless reboot cycles.

In this post, we tell you a few ways to solve these problems.

Hard Reboot

If you’re an iOS user since sometime, by now you’d know that most problems (even on non-jailbroken phones) can be solved by a hard reset. Press and hold the Home and Sleep/Wake (or Power) button simultaneously for a few seconds till you see the Apple logo again. This should get you out of any app that’s in an unresponsive state. There are times when my iPhone becomes completely unresponsive to not only touch inputs, but the Sleep/Wake button as well, in such cases the hard reboot comes in handy.

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Fix Endless Reboot Loop using Volume Up trick

If your jailbroken iOS device is stuck in an endless reboot loop, it is most likely caused by a broken or incompatible jailbreak tweak that you’ve recently installed. In such situations the hard reboot solution also doesn’t work since the tweak tries to run again when iOS boots up. To solve this, when your iOS device is booting up, simultaneously keep the Volume Up button pressed and you should be able to see your Lock screen again. Now you can open Cydia, and uninstall the tweak that you think is creating problems.

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If the Volume up button is not working on your iOS device then use the Clicker (not Volume up) button on your headsets or earphones.

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If you’re interested in reading what exactly happens when you hold down the Volume Key, read on.

Most system tweaks depend on a framework called Mobile Substrate. The framework was developed keeping in mind that when you’re messing with system internals, things could go wrong. By pressing the Volume up button, Mobile Substrate gets disabled entirely, and doesn’t let the problematic tweak load, allowing your iOS device to go past the Apple logo. saurik had added this safe mode feature for Mobile Substrate last year to fix horribly broken jailbreak apps and tweaks.

Fix Endless Reboot Loop with Redsn0w:

If the volume up button trick doesn’t work, check out the video below to find out how to fix the endless reboot loop problem using Redsn0w:

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Check compatibility before installing tweaks

Many developers are still updating their tweaks to work on iOS 6, so before installing anything from Cydia, ensure that iOS 6.1/6.0 is supported. So it is recommended that you check the compatibility of the jailbreak apps and tweaks before installing. We’re maintaining a list of iOS 6.1 compatible jailbreak tweaks here.

Let us know how it goes in the comments. If you have any other issues, please head over to our forums and let us know about the problem so we can help.