How can i restart my iPhone if my lock button doesn't work?

March 19, 2011 2:39 PM

How can i restart my iPhone if my lock button doesn't work?

It's been broken for about two months now. It's surprisingly non-essential. The only times I ever miss it are when I want to take a screenshot (sadly impossible at the moment).
Anyway, I just installed an app that asks me to restart my iPhone to complete installation. Is there a way to do that?

posted by Silky Slim to Computers & Internet (14 answers total)

Best answer: Go to the Settings app, dig down into the bit where you can "Reset Network Settings" and do that. It'll restart the phone. All you'll lose are, well, your network settings (wifi connection, etc) but you can quite quickly redo those.
posted by wackybrit at 2:42 PM on March 19, 2011 [2 favorites]

You can hold the home and power buttons simutaneously for about 10-15 seconds and that should cause a full reboot as well (unless the home or power button are what is broken..).
posted by samsara at 2:44 PM on March 19, 2011

Response by poster: Yeah, the broken one is the lock/power button.
posted by Silky Slim at 2:47 PM on March 19, 2011

This happened with my old 3G - what I found best to work was to do a backup and restore from backup in iTunes. Took a few minutes, but worked like a charm.
posted by General Malaise at 3:00 PM on March 19, 2011

Response by poster: wackybrit - thanks for the tip, it's slightly scary, big red button pops up... Waiting to see if there's any other way, otherwise I'll do it.
General Malaise - That would take over an hour...
posted by Silky Slim at 3:02 PM on March 19, 2011

Can you run the battery completely down and then plug it back in? I would think that would essentially be a restart.
posted by rhapsodie at 3:29 PM on March 19, 2011

My power/lock button is gone too, but I find if I press the of the phone against a hard surface (I use the side of my kitchen counter) and really press the hell out of it, I get it to register. Enough to restart it, anyway, and enough to put it to sleep if I am too impatient to wait.
posted by dirtdirt at 3:40 PM on March 19, 2011

Best answer: got the same problem: resetting the network settings restarts your iphone too, you'd just have to re-enter your wifi passcodes.
posted by ts;dr at 3:43 PM on March 19, 2011

(oops, just saw that the first answer already got it right)
posted by ts;dr at 3:47 PM on March 19, 2011

If you're using slightly old firmware (4.0.1), you can jailbreak your phone by going to jailbreakme.com in mobile Safari, and after that you can just install a program to give you on-screen buttons for rebooting the phone and for taking screenshots. (Newer versions of the firmware currently require holding down the lock button as part of the jailbreak process...)
posted by dreamyshade at 3:51 PM on March 19, 2011

Response by poster: I guess resetting the network settings is the easiest way... Just did it, worked like a charm. Thanks, wackybrit and ts;dr
posted by Silky Slim at 3:55 PM on March 19, 2011

the easiest way is to jailbreak you're phone (any version but the one that was released the other week). once you do that, go into Cydia and install Springboard. this is a utility you can open with a swipe across the top of the screen, that has shortcuts for settings including an option to lock, shutdown, and even reboot.
posted by Mach5 at 6:02 PM on March 19, 2011 [1 favorite]

(Mach5: sounds like we're both thinking SBSettings...)
posted by dreamyshade at 7:25 PM on March 19, 2011

nthing jailbreaking and installing SBSettings. It's by far the fastest way of sleeping/rebooting/shutting down without a working Sleep/Wake button.
posted by henryaj at 4:13 AM on March 20, 2011