Cydia Crashes When Loading

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:

1. 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.
2. 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)
3. 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.
4. 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.)
5. 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)
6. 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.
7. Delete all of the files except for the partial folder
8. Disconnect the SSH connection in your program
9. 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*/
Did you appreciate this article? Be original! Click here to donate via paypal.