You can make a difference in the Apple Support Community!

When you sign up with your Apple Account, you can provide valuable feedback to other community members by upvoting helpful replies and User Tips.

Looks like no one’s replied in a while. To start the conversation again, simply ask a new question.

Soft and Hard Reset

I have couple of questions about soft and hard reset.
1. What is soft reset and hard reset?
2. What is the difference b/w them?
3. Does doing the soft or hard reset erase all the data from the phone?
4. Can batteries issues such as no charging be resolved through soft or hard reset?

Kindly respond.
Thanks.

ipone 3G, iPhone OS 2.x

Posted on Jun 19, 2010 1:29 PM

Reply
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Jun 19, 2010 1:37 PM

Soft = Turn phone off and on.
Hard = BOTH buttons held until you see Apple Logo.

Difference: I like to explain by thinking of a laptop. On a laptop (or even computer) you can go to hibernation mode (memory gets written to disk then powers down). When turned on, it loads back up from memory and thus everything that was loaded in memory before shutting down is put back. That is what a Soft reset is (when you do the power button the slide to turn off).
Thus if there was a memory leak for example in some program causing issues (sluggish, crashes, etc)....then if you just turn off and on, it will still have issues.
A hard reset is like pulling the plug on your computer. It will have to turn back on and reboot fully. It does write an error log out to itself (nothing you see) but causes no harm to your phone or data. It is just a way to do a full clean boot up. This actually fixes about 90% of the issues most people have.

Has no effect on battery outside of the fact it has to boot up thus processor and read writes will be happening.

Message was edited by: DaVBMan
2 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Jun 19, 2010 1:37 PM in response to khanmkl

Soft = Turn phone off and on.
Hard = BOTH buttons held until you see Apple Logo.

Difference: I like to explain by thinking of a laptop. On a laptop (or even computer) you can go to hibernation mode (memory gets written to disk then powers down). When turned on, it loads back up from memory and thus everything that was loaded in memory before shutting down is put back. That is what a Soft reset is (when you do the power button the slide to turn off).
Thus if there was a memory leak for example in some program causing issues (sluggish, crashes, etc)....then if you just turn off and on, it will still have issues.
A hard reset is like pulling the plug on your computer. It will have to turn back on and reboot fully. It does write an error log out to itself (nothing you see) but causes no harm to your phone or data. It is just a way to do a full clean boot up. This actually fixes about 90% of the issues most people have.

Has no effect on battery outside of the fact it has to boot up thus processor and read writes will be happening.

Message was edited by: DaVBMan

Soft and Hard Reset

Welcome to Apple Support Community
A forum where Apple customers help each other with their products. Get started with your Apple Account.