I am wondering how it really works and why for example if the device software seems broken. All it takes is a simple restore and it’s expected that it will all fix everything?
Also how come the restore partition never gets corrupted and is able to install the brand new software again and get it all working?
In: Technology
Imagine you have a really, really tangled rope. You could spend a lot of time untangling it, or you could just get a new rope.
Factory reset wipes everything you’ve done to the device, good or bad, back to the point where we are almost absolutely sure it works—the state it was in when you bought it.
The mechanics of it depend on the device itself. For some systems, it’s sufficient to literally just erase everything. Things like disk drives don’t really have a factory state aside from “nothing”, so it’s sufficient to just wipe all the memory. For more complex systems, you may have to download a replacement—for instance, you can “factory reset” a windows installation by reinstalling windows over the system.
There’s usually the ability to keep a part of memory that the computer is physically incapable of writing to, so it cannot change. A computer could have a second drive that’s disconnected and read-only, that only gets connected when a factory reset is requested. Oftentimes you really don’t need a lot of storage to store what to do for a reset (e.g., for the drive example, we basically just need to store instructions that say “wipe everything”), so it’s not a large overhead. Sometimes that responsibility is passed onto the user, like factory resetting a computer will often require the user to reinstall the OS themselves.
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