In a recent article, I had mentioned that cydia was crashing on the ‘loading data’ screen. I tried finding the cause and the solution to this problem on many forums but didn’t find anything. But in a comment someone gave me a link to a site who had cause and also the solution to it. The reason why cydia started crashing was some repositories were corrupted or broken OR had loaded some broken packages. So cydia started to crash.
The solution to this problem is very simple. You just have to delete some files. You can either SSH and use any software like iPhone Browser OR iPhone PcSuite to access your iPhone system files (there are many others which you can use). You can also do it directly delete those files by using MobileFinder OR iFile. I prefer iFile as it has the option to delete multiple files at a time.
I used iFile and directly deleted files from my iPhone, but it is safer to first backup those files you are deleting and then delete them if in case something goes wrong so you can reload those files. The files that have to be deleted is in the path var/lib/apt/lists. There you have to delete all files except the ‘partial’ folder. I deleted approximately 140 files as I had installed all the repositories. After deleting all the files simply reboot your iPhone and start cydia. It should work fine, and no software’s/packages shall be deleted or lost.
Note: This process is tried and tested on iPhone firmware version 2.2 .
Update: Many have got this working for firmware 3.0 aswell. Read the comments below for more help, the community power is amazing ….
Update: Chris has a much reliable way it seems to get this thing done (read here):
- Shell access (terminal or ssh)
- Su to root
- dpkg -configure -a
- apt-get update
- apt-get installs cydia (if this fails add –fix-missing)
- apt-get upgrade (to install mobilesubstrate correctly)
- reboot