If Cydia was working fine, but is now crashing in the first few seconds of loading do this:
Delete the contents of the /var/lib/apt/lists folder (except for the folder called “partial”) through SSH.
How to do that:
If you’re comfortable using a command line terminal you can do that.. But most people aren’t, so you can do it this way too:
- Turn SSH and Wi-Fi on in your iphone (can do this through toggles in Bossprefs, SBSettings etc;) If you don’t see the option for SSH in these or your similar toggling program, then you need to install SSH on your phone. OpenSSH is a good one that you can find in Installer. If it still isn’t showing up or working then you need to also install BSD Subsystem via Installer.
- Open the SSH program of your choice on your computer (for mac I like Cyberduck – Fugu is another but it’s a little sketchy sometimes. For PC, try WinSCP or try searching the google)
- Get the Wi-Fi IP address of your phone. You can find this through SBSettings, or other IP displaying app.. Should be something like: 192.168.3.8 (your numbers will be slightly different) and not: 77.76.23.2- You can also find the IP address of your phone the way Apple intended by opening the Settings app on your phone, selecting Wi-Fi, and pressing the little blue arrow at the right of your current network’s name – the first one listed is IP Address, that’s what you want. Or you can log in to your router through a browser and find it through the DHCP network list. Not going to go into how to do that now – search for how to do that for your specific router on the internet if you’re curious.
- Enter the Wi-Fi IP address of your phone in the SSH program and use the username: root and the password: alpine to connect to it (if you changed the username and password.. you would know, but those are the defaults.)
- Find the folder /var/lib/apt/lists (may have to backtrack to the var folder – default log-in isn’t always the root folder where var is)
- I opted to back up all of the files I was deleting simply by dragging them to a folder on the desktop – you don’t have to, but having a way to undo stuff is usually a good option to have.
- Delete all of the files except for the partial folder
- Disconnect the SSH connection in your program
- Open Cydia and download horrible all-pink themes for Winterboard
Why did that happen:
Some repositories were corrupted or broken – it’s not your fault. Personally, this happened immedietely after I locked the program with the app “lockdown” which adds a file to this exact folder. So, after confirming that Cydia worked again, I tried locking it again, restarting, turning on and off different lock types – and cydia worked fine. I also hid the icon with bossprefs – Checked to see if this was the culprit and it was not. So far I haven’t had any trouble using lockdown or hiding icons through bossprefs or SBSettings. Seems this happened just because of a few bad repositories.
/* EDIT July 9th 09: You can also try iPhoneBrowser, a windows application. Here is a nice article about the features, looks pretty cool, eh? Thanks to theaizunsnapbox and hopeless (in the comments section) for suggesting and trying out this method. */
/*EDIT July 20th 09: If deleting the contents of the lists folder does not fix the problem you can also try deleting the contents of the /var/lib/dpkg/updates/ folder. Thanks to shinigamiboi and others for testing this out. */
/*EDIT April 8th 10: A question has been asked several times; How do you get installer on your phone without re-breaking? – I’m currently without iPhone atm (life is tough 
) – so if anyone has an answer to this please comment below*/
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