I was one of the first iPhone users in the Netherlands due to a friend who imported one for me from the states. There was no appstore back in those day and to enable the phone in the Netherlands, one had to jailbrake it and remove the carrier limitation. I have been hacking iPhones ever since, sometimes getting in trouble by doing stupid stuff but always able to fix it. Always.

I haven't touched my old iPhone 1 for some years, I have a iPhone 4 now and the 1 model is really running on an outdated iOS that cant be upgraded anymore and feels slow. That is, it should have felt slow. But it didn't when I booted it this morning.

My daughter might want the iPhone, without SIM and Apple appstore credentials, she is nearly 8, just for the games and the camera. So I hooked the iPhone up to the power and when I came back, I saw the message that I had to wait for over 6 million seconds, decades!

After a bit of Googling I found the solution, without going through DFU, rejailbreak and restore. For this to work, you need:

1. A jailbroken iPhone
2. WiFi enabled on the iPhone and still hooked up to you local WiFi (I needed to put the old pass-phrase back on my WiFi encryption)
3. the root password of the iPhone (my second guess was right :-)
4. A computer

Then do the following. Boot your iPhone, go to a terminal of a unix box and find out what the IP address of the iPhone is by doing an
arp -a
and pick the iPhone out of it. Now do a
ssh root@ipaddress
and type your root password. The default one is "alphine". I changed it but remembered it. Now do
cd /private/var/mobile/Libary/Preferences
and remove or move the com.apple.springboard.plist file.
I dont like rm for this so moved it with a
mv com.apple.springboard.plist com.apple.springboard.plist.bak

Now do a
cd /private/var/Keychains
and move the keychain-2.db file
mv keychain-2.db keychain-2.db.bak

Do a hard reset of your iPhone (home power) and when it reboots, it should have no lock and no "wait xyz minutes".

My daughter will be using the iPhone shortly :-)