How to Perform an iPhone Hard Reset Or Master Reset

If you have ever tried to turn your iPhone on and nothing happens, this can be a scary situation that can be easily remedied in most cases. This same situation just happened to my brother recently so I thought that it would be worth writing a short how to article to help out other iPhone owners and save them the time of calling AT&T or Apple customer support for something that you can do for yourself in just a couple of minutes.

The master reset or iPhone hard reset as some call it, does not remove any data from your phone, so don’t worry about losing any of your apps or phone numbers, it simply restarts the phone from the most basic level and clears some information that is normally saved to cache memory which can fix many iPhone bugs and small problems. The process is really simple and you can have your favorite phone back up in running in no time. The hard reset will fix a lot of common software issues like black screens, locked up apps and even clear cache that cannot be cleared using clever apps like memory sweep.

If an application is hung up, many times you can force the app to exit by holding down the “sleep/wake” button on the top of the phone for about 6 seconds or until the application closes out. This is known as a soft reset, the iPhone attempts to kill whatever process is currently active when you do this. If you are not able to get the app to close or if you are experiencing a frozen or black screen, then you may need to apply the hard reset. You can do this my holding the “sleep/wake” button and the home button simultaneously for about 10 seconds. You will know when the hard reset has taken place because the Apple logo will be displayed. You can let go of all the buttons when you see this screen.

For most all software glitches this will get you back up and running in no time at all. It may take up to 5 minutes for the iPhone to reboot completely and come back to the locked screen and this is normal. If you are still having problems or are not able to get the screen with the Apple logo to come up, you may have to take the next step. This means contacting Apple customer support directly in most cases AT&T will not do much for issues with this phone and you will most likely get faster service by contacting Apple directly.