Troubleshooting
Author: Artillect
Unfortunately, your device has stopped working! You don't want to restore your device to a newer version because you've waited months to get a working jailbreak. Don't worry! By following this guide, we'll give you the knowledge necessary to fix (or find out how to fix) your iOS device.
Requirements and useful tools
Generally you'll want to have these tools installed on your device before something goes wrong, but some of these come preinstalled on your device and only require installation on your computer.
SSH (Secure Shell)
Possibly the most popular tool out of all of these is SSH. It allows you to connect to your device over your local network (or USB if you have it configured), and can run commands on your device to fix some of the issues you might be having, including but not limited to:
- Device unresponsiveness
- Black screens
- Respring loops
SSH comes preinstalled on most jailbreaks, including Electra. SSH is also preinstalled on many operating systems, but might need to be enabled through your computer's settings before you can use it in your terminal of choice. Alternatively, you can install a SSH client like PuTTY using this guide for Windows (tutorials for other operating systems are linked in that guide).
Once you've installed SSH, it's important that you know how to use it. This guide shows you how to SSH into your device, and how to change your device's root password (which is something that everyone who is jailbroken should do to improve device security). Once you've changed your device's root password, remember to keep track of it someplace safe so you know what it is in the future. If you choose to not change your device's root password, remember that there are risks with doing this and that anyone on your network can access the files on your device if you don't change the password from the default.
CocoaTop
CocoaTop is a tool that allows you to view the CPU usage, RAM usage, and various other data related to the apps, daemons, and other services running on your device. It is basically Windows's "task manager" but for your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch. CocoaTop is named after the 'top' command found on many Unix distributions.
If your device is running slow, you can use CocoaTop to identify the process that is causing performance issues. I don't recommend this, but you can use that information to force kill the process and free up system resources. This can cause severe system instability issues and may cause more issues than your device was having before.
CrashReporter
Crashreporter is a useful tweak that will show you what caused your device to crash. Sometimes it doesn't tell you exactly what caused the crash, but generally you get a good idea of what is causing the issue. When it doesn't tell you what caused the issue, you can use this guide to give yourself a better idea of what's going wrong.
Filza
Filza is another useful tool you can install on your device that allows you to browse the files present on your device. Filza is found on Cydia, but it can also be sideloaded using Cydia Impactor (which you should already be familiar with because you used it to install Electra). iCleaner is another tweak that is found on this repo that you can use to clean up unused files on your device.
It's also important to know how your device works. Familiarize yourself with settings available in stock iOS, because some of your problems or requests for tweaks might already be available by default.
0. Identifying the problem
Identify the problem. I know this sounds like a stupid step but it'll be vital later on when you're trying to search for a solution or tell others what's going wrong with your device. The better you can explain your issue, the easier it will be for others to help you solve your problem.
There's a few common categories of issues that will have different methods of solving, some of those include:
- Crashing to safemode
- Issues with Cydia
- Issues with system themes
- Respring loop
- Bootlooping (only present on older fully-untethered jailbreaks AFAIK) (possible on any jailbreak if you screw up badly enough)
- High CPU/battery usage
- Nonfunctional tweaks
1. Fixing using easy methods
Now to actually solving your problem. One of the first things you should do when you encounter an issue (except for a respring loop) is restarting your device. You can do this by shutting down your device and then turning it back on. If the problem doesn't come back immediately, you might have solved it, but you might not be done fixing it.
If the problem started after you installed a new tweak or app, uninstall that tweak or app, and restart your device. If the problem was caused by that tweak or app, your problem will go away 99.9% of the time. In the 0.1% of times that your problem doesn't go away, you can probably solve it by deleting the old preference files (.plist) for that tweak in iCleaner.
If you're having trouble installing tweaks in Cydia, try reloading your sources by going to the sources tab in Cydia and pressing the reload button.
If all else fails, try changing settings related to the issue you're getting. Don't fiddle with stuff in Filza or in your terminal unless you know what you're doing, but make changes to settings that you feel might solve the problem. If you never try it out, you'll never figure out your problem! Part of the fun of jailbreaking is figuring out stuff as you go (in my opinion).
2. Searching for a solution
If you can't solve your problem on your own, let's see if someone else on the internet has run into what you're dealing with. Whenever I have a problem, I check out the /r/jailbreak FAQ, which has a lot of solutions to common problems. Problems with newer tweaks or jailbreaks might not be found on there, so you might have better luck using Google to find a solution.
Start by searching for the error message you are getting or a simple description of what is happening. Add your iOS version and reddit too (I find it helps a lot). For example, the search "reddit jailbreak snapchat ban ios 11" will give you multiple useful reddit posts, forum posts, and articles from reputable sites about jailbreaking. Sites like iDownloadblog are absolutely excellent for guides and solutions to common issues. If your first search doesn't work, try searching again! Use different words in your search, try googling "snapchat banned snapchat++" or whatever tweak you believe may be causing an issue. Using different combinations of search terms is the best way to get different results that may be more useful than the last.
Reddit's built-in search gets a lot of hate, but it can be very useful. Searching for one word in /r/jailbreak, like the name of the tweak, app, or daemon you're having issues with can have great results. Searching for nsurlsessiond shows you a large number of posts discussing issues with it, most of which have solutions in the comment sections.
3. Ask for a solution
If you can't find it through all of this searching, head over to the /r/Jailbreak Discord. If you're not familiar with Discord, it's essentially a chat program where people can run chat servers with individual channels (which begin with #). You can use @ to mention other users (similar to using /u/ on reddit, or @ on Twitter). Feel free to ask your question in either the channel #genius-bar or #genius-bar-2. They'll either help you with your problem or direct you to a channel better suited for solving your problem. Make sure to fully describe your issue, tell them your device, your iOS version, and what you believe is causing the issue. I find that asking people on the Discord server for solutions to my problems is the fastest way of getting a solution, but you might have better results by making a post on the subreddit.
Start by writing a descriptive title that concisely describes the issue you're having. Use similar words that you used in your Google searches but make it into a full sentence that people can read. In the text of the post, describe your issue just like you did on the Discord server. The more information you tell people, the more likely you are to get a useful solution. This guide provides even more information about how you can make a post that is really helpful to the people trying to solve your problem. After you make your post and people respond, try out what they tell you to do, or answer any questions they have about your issue. If you don't understand something they tell you, feel free to ask a clarifying question. Also, make sure to press the reply button under the people that respond to your post. If you don't, and you just respond to your post, they won't know that you responded and they won't be able to help you as quickly.
At this point, you will probably solve your issue and you'll be done. If not, you can submit an issue report on the tweak's GitHub page. The developer of that tweak might respond to your issue and help you solve it.
4. The nuclear option
If nothing at all works to solve your problem, you can remove your jailbreak and reinstall it using this guide. On iOS 11 Electra, you can use Semirestore Lite 11 to revert your device to its state immediately before installing Electra. This guide provides an excellent tutorial on how to do that. You can also use delectra to remove Electra from your device. From this state, you can try installing Electra again, or fully restoring your device and updating to a new version of iOS. Avoid updating as much as possible because you might not be able to jailbreak your device for several months until a new jailbreak is released.