Thank you so much for such an amazing FAQ! However, Im currently in a predicament in upgrading my ipad 1g to 4.2.1 using the shsh blobs saved in Cydia. This is my situation, please bare with me, thank you:
Im currently in 3.2 and have never upgraded since I bought my ipad and jailbroken it. However, now I decided to upgrade it because I frequently get a lot of crashes in my email app and safari, sometimes to the point that I have to restart the device, it occurs frequently now. So I decided to update it to 4.2.1 since I believe that it is the latest ios that can be jailbroken at the moment (untethered), please correct me if im wrong. Im currently using snowbreeze 2.2.1 to make a custom IPSW of 4.2.1 which it did successfully. Now the problem is updating from 3.2 to 4.2.1 Since I remained in 3.2 and had my shsh blobs saved in Cydia, I noticed that Cydia also had saved the shsh blobs up to 4.3b. Now I already edited the hosts file using notepad to include the exact line in the bottom:
74.208.105.171 gs.apple.com
After putting the ipad in the DFU mode (yes I made sure it was in DFU, the screen is black and it was verified by snowbreeze as well). The problem is I get the exact same error 3194, and could never get past it. Another problem is that I dont have locally saved shsh blobs so I dont think I can use tiny umbrella (im such an idiot for not saving it locally as well). So any help is truly and greatly appreciated. I want to know if it's possible to update in my situation? Take in mind I never updated my device to any of the ios versions before, and stayed in 3.2, but since Cydia automatically backed up newer ios version shsh blobs, I'm taking a chance that updating to a certain version might work.