iPhone Peculiar situation with my iphone 3GS stuck in a loop

[Slavetomyiphone]

Hello. I've been researching my particular problem for a few days not without any luck; maybe some of the iphone experts here can help. I have a 3GS that was running 5.1.1 jailbroken for over a year. Last week, I suddenly lost all of my songs. They were still on the iphone but they wouldn't get recognized. I tried to resync the phone with itunes several times and that didn't work. I then ran through the instructions I had used to originally upgrade to 5.1.1 from 3.1.2. They appear below. I did not restore using a new ipsw file from redsn0w but just used the one I had originally created a year ago. After the recovery process was completed, I connected to itunes again and tried to restore the backup with all of my songs, files, and most importantly, messages and app data. After that process was completed, the phone rebooted and entered a loop, switching between the lock screen, which I could unlock if I swiped quickly enough, and the spinning white wheel over a black background. The phone was on this loop endlessly until the battery drained. I tried the whole process several times, ending up with the same problem each time. I didn't expect this error because I had followed the exact same instructions as when I had upgraded from 3.1.2. Bottom line is, I'd like to return my phone to the state it was in before my music was lost: jailbroken 5.1.1 with all of my app data intact. What am I doing wrong?


Backup your phone using itunes. You do this by syncing your phone (w/o updating it).
Upgrading to 5.1.1 while preserving baseband using redsnow (you need to preserve your baseband so you can unlock your phone)
http://absinthejailbreak.com/update-to-ios-5-1-1-preserve-baseband-mac-win/
Jailbreak using absinthe
restore your last 3.1.3 backup using itunes to get all of your files back on the phone
unlock using