iPhone: Factory Reset

A couple of weeks ago my father asked me if he could use my iPhone 4 so he could give my sister his iPhone 5 until an iPhone 6 was available for purchase. I treat my phones pretty well so the iPhone 4 is in pretty good shape, it just had all my account information on it.

But as you can imagine, it has been a while since I've gone into it. And of course, for personal reasons, I changed the email address associated with my Apple ID. So it made it impossible to restore to factory settings! I couldn't agree to the "new" Terms & Conditions which meant I couldn't turn off "Find my iPhone" which apparently can't be on when restoring an iPhone. And when I went to iCloud and logged it, "Find my iPhone" only listed my current iPhone and not this old one.

Needless to say, I was annoyed. So I went to the Apple Store and the Genius there told me to do everything I had already done.. and redirected me to Apple Support which meant I got to schedule a phone call. And that was fun because I kept getting disconnected after 5 minutes.

However, in spite of all of that, I got the answer. If you have an iPhone that you are unable to restore to factory there is a solution! With the iPhone turned off, (1) hold the "Home" button and connect it to a computer (with iTunes). (2) Keep holding while waiting. (3) Once it tells you it has entered restore mode and starts to restore the iPhone to factory, release and wait for it to do it's thing. (4) Then you've got yourself a factory reset iPhone.

Lesson learned: when done with an iPhone you might use again, at least turn off "Find my iPhone" before abandoning it in a drawer.