How to Reset a Forgotten Password for an iOS Device
A little off topic for Poppit Sands, but I had one of the girls saying they had forgotten the password to their ipod and locked themselves out. OK re-attach to Itunes and you can remove the block and start guessing the password again, but there is no supported way to just to reset the password. Restore the device and loose things is the only solution offered on most pages. So lots of digging and I found several sets of partial instructions that say they work. Well they do and below is my instructions on how to recover the password for an ipod 4th Gen. To be honest the software will do iphones and other ipod version. So here goes. Like all shareware I would run in a virtual machine just in case there are any nasties in the code… these seem ok and the links are where I got the code from.
1) Download Gecko Iphone Toolkit – link
2) Download a firmware image. It suggests iPod4,1_5.0.1_9A405_Restore.ipsw I found a copy of this here and others
3) Unpack Gecko and run the iphone toolkit exe. Select device of ipod touch 4th Gen and hit boot. Select the image just downloaded in the pop up. Now the difficult bit. Shut your ipod down.
4) Repeat. Shut your ipod down while the cable is still connected.
5) Enter DFU mode by holding down the power on button and the centre home button for SEVEN seconds and then release the power button and hold the centre/home button down for 10 seconds. Ipod should load some custom firmware and flash stuff up and down. When complete press ‘cancel’ and go back to the first Gecko screen.
6) Press Launch and wait
7) Your iphone should start scrolling the same message over and over until the screen is full. Its just guessing the password for you. there are 9999 combinations so this will take a while. Reports say up to 20mins. Mind took 10mins. But if the bottom of the screen on the iphone is flashing as its scrolling the same message up over and over I would say leave it for a while.
8) Now i tried several times before success and never saw the iphone scrolling messages. If it doesn’t then I suspect you will wait forever and have messed up the earlier steps. Shut everything now and start again. I had to manually kill a windows process tcprelay32.exe in order to restart Gecko.
9) SO when its successful you a get message up with your passcode detailed on about the 9th line.
