Tutorial – Resetting a Crashed iPhone

Has your phone’s screen ever locked-up permanently? Here are a few tricks to try when your iPhone has iFroze….

 

Resetting A Crashed iPhone

Everything has frozen. There’s nothing you can do! Or is there?

 

01. Hard Reboot

From the iPhone 3 line on, Apple has included a simple feature to manually reboot their smart phones without relying on iOS.

Considering this is exactly the sort of situation, when a glitch or crash has rendered your device unresponsive, that you would need such a feature, it was a smart addition on Apple’s part.

To activate a hard reboot on you iPhone, just follow the directions below:

1. Press  the Sleep/Wake button and the Home buttons at the same time.

2. Hold them down until the device responds, usually between 5-10 seconds, and the screen goes black. (You may need to continue to press even after the red Power-Off slider appears.)

3. When the silver Apple logo appears, you can release the buttons.

4. The iPhone should begin rebooting as normal.

In nearly every instance of prolonged unresponsiveness, the hard reboot method should resolve the issue. Even better, you shouldn’t lose any of the data on your phone, though depending on what you were doing when the crash occurred, some apps may not have auto-saved your input.

 

 

02. Use Recovery Mode for Persistent Problems

Hard reboots are all well and good for resolving one-time crashes, but if your iPhone freezes on a regular basis, or the problem gets worse (such as restart loops, interrupted updates/backup restores, and when your device won’t register in iTunes), the next step is to activate Recovery Mode.

NOTE: While this process only mentions iPhones, it’s worth noting that this mode is available on all Apple products, such as iPads, iPods, etc.

WARNING: Using Recovery Mode will delete all data on your iPhone!

1. Connect data cable to computer, but not to iPhone just yet.

2. Turn off iPhone, using hard reboot if necessary.

3. Hold down the Home button while inserting data cable into iPhone.

4. When iPhone powers up, the Apple logo will display, keep holding Home button until you see the iTunes/USB cable screen.

5. iPhone is now in Recovery Mode.

6. You can now use restore your iPhone to either Restore from Backup or Factory Default State.

 

03. Restore from Backup

One of the reasons why it’s important to keep your phone synced with iTunes on a regular basis is that each time you do, your phone’s data is backed up on the computer.

This comes in handy when a persistent problem has left your phone inaccessible, and you need to reset your iPhone from scratch, without losing your settings.

To restore your iPhone data from Backup, use the following steps:

1. Connect your iPhone cable to an open USB port on the computer your backup is stored on.

2. On the iPhone Management screen, find and click the Restore button.

3. Follow the directions provided, and ‘Agree’ to the iPhone Software License, click ‘Continue’.

4. Enter your iTunes Account information.

5. Register your iPhone with iTunes.

6. On the Setup Your iPhone screen, select the second option, Restore from the backup of [Your iPhone].

7. The restore process will begin, and typically doesn’t take very long.

8. Afterward, confirm that your iPhone and iTunes settings are correct. (You may lose some data if your device hasn’t been synced recently.

9. Some settings may need to be input again, such as music and email syncing. Though the basic settings restore is short, syncing large music libraries and the like may be a much lengthier process.

 

04. Reset to Factory Default

If the persistent crashing problem on your iPhone is due to a problem related to a system update, app, or the like, and a Backup restore would not remove the offending code, you may need to resort to the nuclear option: Wiping out your iPhone completely.

1. To reset your phone to its default, original settings, follow the first five steps from the Restore from Backup tutorial above.

2. At Step 6, select the Setup as new iPhone option, then click Continue.

3. Your iPhone is now reset to the blank slate it was in when you first received it, and while all of your settings and data are lost, you should at least be able to use the device while the issue is sorted out by the eggheads at Apple.

4. Sending diagnostic reports to Apple is a good way to facilitate this process.

05. Last Resort

In the event that none of these steps fixes the problem of crashing and/or freezing on your iPhone, it’s time to take your device in for repairs, or maybe even getting a replacement phone.