After poking at these crash report files I spent a little time searching my MacBook to find the iPhone firmware. It turns out that the firmware is not part of the basic iTunes 7.3 install.
Somehow I got the iPhone Mail client into a weird state where it was downloading email but would only show me the initial set-up your Mail client display. To resolve this issue I decided that it was time to use iTunes to restore my iPhone to factory settings. This triggered iTunes to start a 91.2MB download that is named iPhone Software Update.
The iPhone Software Update is downloaded into ~/Library/iTunes/iPhone Software Updates folder for the current user. This update is also available as a direct download from Apple servers at http://appldnld.apple.com.edgesuite.net/content.info.apple.com/iPhone/061-3538.20070629.B7vXa/iPhone1,1_1.0_1A543a_Restore.ipsw.
The iPhone1,1_1.0_1A543a_Restore.ipsw file is a ZIP archive containing the following files:
694-5259-38.dmg 694-5262-39.dmg Firmware Firmware/all_flash Firmware/all_flash/all_flash.m68ap.production Firmware/all_flash/all_flash.m68ap.production/applelogo.img2 Firmware/all_flash/all_flash.m68ap.production/batterycharging.img2 Firmware/all_flash/all_flash.m68ap.production/batterylow0.img2 Firmware/all_flash/all_flash.m68ap.production/batterylow1.img2 Firmware/all_flash/all_flash.m68ap.production/DeviceTree.m68ap.img2 Firmware/all_flash/all_flash.m68ap.production/iBoot.m68ap.RELEASE.img2 Firmware/all_flash/all_flash.m68ap.production/LLB.m68ap.RELEASE.img2 Firmware/all_flash/all_flash.m68ap.production/manifest Firmware/all_flash/all_flash.m68ap.production/needservice.img2 Firmware/all_flash/all_flash.m68ap.production/recoverymode.img2 Firmware/dfu Firmware/dfu/iBSS.m68ap.RELEASE.dfu Firmware/dfu/WTF.s5l8900xall.RELEASE.dfu kernelcache.restore.release.s5l8900xrb Restore.plist
The iPhone restore process takes a couple of minutes for iTunes to transfer the firmware to the phone. After the transfer, the phone reboots, and then takes a few seconds for AT&T to activate the phone.
Once the phone is activated iTunes allows the user to Set up as a new iPhone, or to Restore the phone from an earlier backup. Restoring from backup involves the iPhone rebooting again followed immediately by an automatic sync of Contacts, Music. (Presumably this also will cause a sync of videos and photos if you have those items setup to sync.)
After the restore the iPhone needed both my voicemail password and the WiFi password for my home network to be re-entered. The phone had also lost the two pictures I had taken with the iPhone camera… fortunately I had sync’d them into iPhoto. One of these pictures was set as the iPhone Wallpaper and still showed as the wallpaper.
Unfortunately, after the restore the iPhone Mail account is back to downloading over a thousand email messages that I have received and deleted over the past couple of weeks. All of these messages have been deleted using Apple Mail on my MacBook and I have flushed the deleted messages from the mail server. Hopefully this will settle down otherwise I will need to use a separate iPhone email address and run filtering services to limit what gets delivered to the phone.
36 hours after getting it, the iPhone is still looking like a good decision.
Update
The Restore.plist file indicates that the 15MB 694-5259-38.dmg disk image is a RAMDisk image. Presumably this loads into the reported 1Gbit of flash that is presumed to be built into the ARM processor used by the iPhone (ifixit disassembly). The 694-5262-39.dmg file is the “System Restore Image”. This second image file weighs in at 82.3MB and certainly contains the OS X file system, libraries and application files.
