Finding Your iPhone's UDID After You've Made It Inoperable

This is what happens when you rush forward into things.

I ponied up cash for the Apple Developer License a while back. and lo & behold, developers can download the DMG for the 3.0 Beta firmware update from the iPhone Dev Center! So I went and installed iPhone OS 3.0 Beta tonight … I wanted to check out the cut’n’paste capabilities, etc. I downloaded and extracted the firmware update package, started iTunes, held down [Ctrl+Option] when clicking ‘Check for Update’ to bring up the file selector dialog, and installed the 3.0 Beta IPSW.

Great! Hooray! It’s the usual slow process. However, once the device restarts, it goes into pre-activation mode … and iTunes rejects it as not behing a registered development device. Open up the Device Management Portal, and it tells you how about Locating a Unique Device ID … “The 40 hex character String in the Identifier field is your device’s UDID.” I believe they refer to it as an ICCID in other places.

Well, this magical String-of-many-names gets shown when your device is connected to iTunes … but of course, that’s the problem! It already won’t accept my device => meta-problem. So, then I read further … “Please DO NOT install the iPhone OS before registering device UDIDs, as installation on non-registered devices will render them inoperable.”

Yeesh. I figured that I’m toast. I can easily find the Serial Number and IMEI, but not the UDID, at least according to Apple’s instructions.

To make a long story short … wait, how long have I been talking? … oh, anyway. Look at System Profiler (if you haven’t already) … under USB :: USB High Speed Bus :: iPhone :: Serial Number. Register that as a developer device, and you’re good to go as soon as you re-boot the phone & iTunes. There’s a much more elaborate description of the process using Xcode, but it doesn’t seem to be mandatory cause I sure ain’t done that.

And yes … OS 3.0’s cut’n’paste feature is really nice!

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