Recovery mode can be used to restore your iPhone to factory settings. During the process, your iPhone will be erased and the latest version of iOS will be installed on it.
You might want to do this because you’re having trouble with your iPhone and want to erase it and start over, you might need to erase an iPhone that you don’t have the passcode for, or you can use the recovery mode to remove an iOS beta. Note that this is not quite the same as erasing your iPhone so you can prepare it for sale, in which case you need to follow a different process which will delete all your data and unlink the iPhone from your Apple ID.
Once you restore your iPhone using recovery mode, your iPhone will be running the latest full version of iOS (i.e. not a beta version). You will then be able to restore your iPhone settings and apps from an iCloud backup before the problems started or before the beta was installed.
How to Put Your iPhone in Recovery Mode
You will need Finder on Mac or iTunes on PC to enter recovery mode.
Follow these steps to put your iPhone into recovery mode:
- Plug your iPhone into your computer.
- Open the Finder (if you’re on a PC you need iTunes).
- Locate the iPhone in the left column of the Finder or in iTunes and click on it.
- You may see a message that you need to download an update to access the iPhone, in our experience, said software was not available on the software update server, so don’t worry about that. subject.
- Turn off your iPhone by pressing volume up, volume down, then press and hold the side button. Unlike a usual reboot, press and hold the side button while the phone shuts down and restarts. If successful, you’ll see an image of a Mac and a Lightning connector on your iPhone indicating that it’s in recovery mode.
- On your Mac, you should now see a message that there is a problem with the iPhone that needs updating or restoring. You need to click Restore.
- You will see a warning: “Are you sure you want to restore iPhone…” Click Restore and Update.
- Click Accept on the next screen which details the license agreement.
- Just note that there are only about 15 minutes left before your iPhone exits recovery mode, in which case you will need to enter recovery mode again.
- Your iPhone should restart with the welcome screen if this process worked.
- Now you can either set up your iPhone as new or restore it from an iCloud backup before you start having problems.
Foundry
Another option is DFU mode, which is more drastic and used for tinkering with firmware and the like.
