iphone 3GS update restore saga

One of my colleagues had a jailbroken & unlocked iphone 3GS, and he made the mistake of updating it in iTunes. The phone was stuck in recovery mode when it came to me.

Googling various terms, the first thing I tried was to use TinyUmbrella to kick the phone out of recovery mode, as given here. That did not work. TinyUmbrella was not able to see any info on the phone, not even ECID.

Gathered info including ECID using USBview as given here.

This particular forum post seemed promising - Did I ruin my 3GS . As suggested there, tried the untethered jailbreak with sn0wbreeze, with the tutorial given at this page. Making a bulleted list of the many trials I did - the last two are the successful ones:

• I tried first with the later version of sn0wbreeze, using OS version 4.3.2 instead of 4.2.1. After creating the custom IPSW with sn0wbreeze, iTunes did not allow the update - I thought it was because TinyUmbrella's TSS server was not running. Making a custom IPSW was taking around 5 minutes on my phone.
• At this point, TinyUmbrella was not able to save any blobs - it was not seeing any blobs on the phone. Running iTunes with the TSS server also did not work, it ended with error 1602. The update process in iTunes was taking around 5 minutes.
• The solution for that was to run sn0wbreeze till the end - I thought the phone was already in DFU mode, black screen - but it needed to put the phone in a pwned DFU mode.
• Running sn0wbreeze till the end where it uses iReb to avoid the 16-- errors, the update went till the very end, but then error 37 in iTunes.
• In the above trials, I had chosen New Boot Rom within sn0wbreeze. Perhaps that was the culprit. So made another IPSW with sn0wbreeze, chosing Old Boot Rom.
• This time it went through, iTunes declared it successful, but phone did not boot. It remained in DFU mode even after reboot.
• TinyUmbrella was able to save some blobs now, and it showed 4.1 and 5.0 beta blobs. So tried the same update, with the TSS server running this time. Same result - iTunes success, but phone doesn't boot.
• Tried New Boot Rom IPSW with TSS server - again error 37.
• Tried New Boot Rom IPSW without TSS server - error 3194 this time. "This device is not eligible for the requested build" - so probably I should go with Old Boot Rom  and not New.
• Back to making an Old Bootrom IPSW, on a different usb port, without TSS. Stuck at preparing iphone for restore.
• Tried a different tack - since 4.1 blobs are seen in TinyUmbrella, why not try with that one. For this, downloaded sn0wbreeze 2.1. This time, it worked like a charm - running iTunes with TinyUmbrella's TSS server on. The phone booted up. But it is not unlocked yet.
• To unlock 4.1, this page points to this guide - just need to add repo666.ultrasn0w.com to the sources in Cydia (it was already there) and install ultrasn0w using Cydia Search. Did so, rebooted, and the phone is unlocked, working fine.