How to hard reset your Xbox One


Games consoles are becoming increasingly complex, and unfortunately, the more complex something becomes the more opportunities there are for that thing to break or have some issues. So while you wait for the Xbox Series X to arrive, you might find that your Xbox One has some problems.

Sometimes you'll be in the middle of watching Netflix, or maybe you're just about to win a match of Call Of Duty, and then suddenly, nothing. The Xbox One is a mighty console, but it's not immune to the odd glitch, and that's why sometimes you need to know how to hard reset an Xbox One.

How to hard reset an Xbox One

There are a few different methods for resetting an Xbox One; it all depends on just how severe the crash is. So, we recommend trying the first option first, just to see whether or not you can salvage things in a more civil manner. After all, there's nothing quite as uncouth as having to redownload all of your games because you've somehow corrupted a game save.

So, the easiest way to hard reset an Xbox One is to press and hold the power button until the light turns amber. It should take around ten seconds or so, but you'll probably be panicking so just wait for the light to change colour. This forces the Xbox One to reboot, which should fix the vast majority of issues that games cause when they hard crash. This also doesn't cause any data loss on the console, as it's a very chilled out way of doing a hard reset. However, sometimes that doesn't work, and you'll need to bring in the big guns.

The big guns, in this case at least, involves performing a factory reset of your Xbox One. This is the hardest of resets, and it will basically erase everything from the console and return it to the state it was when you first bought it. This means you'll have to reinstall your games, set up your profile again, and download any save data you might need. It's a drastic option, but sometimes you need to do it.

You can do this by:

  1. Press the home button, or press left on the d-pad until the main home menu opens.
  2. Select the gear icon to open the settings menu.
  3. Go to System > Console info.
  4. Go to Reset console > Reset and remove everything for a full factory reset.

There's no "are you sure you want to do this to me, Dave?", so make sure you're really sure that you want to perform a factory reset before committing to this. If you're looking to do a hard reset on a different console, check this out.

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