Best way to totally restore the Galaxy S4 to factory state ?

[AppleUser]

Yes, there is a menu selection, but a techie told me to hold in the volume and on buttons to get some Developer menu, then select some other way to restore the phone.

I'm ready to erase and restore this S4 as if no one ever used it. How best to do ?

 

[dynomot]

The menu works fine, but the other method involves "recovery mode". Turn phone off then press and hold volume up and home key and power key. Egton the phone vibrates release the power key and you'll end up in recovery. From there use the volume keys to select factory reset. Phone will reboot in its "new out of box" state. It will irretrievably delete all user data (pictures, music, accounts etc)

 

[AppleUser]

The menu works fine, but the other method involves "recovery mode". Turn phone off then press and hold volume up and home key and power key. Egton the phone vibrates release the power key and you'll end up in recovery. From there use the volume keys to select factory reset. Phone will reboot in its "new out of box" state. It will irretrievably delete all user data (pictures, music, accounts etc)

Great. Will do. What is "Egton the phone vibrates…." ?

 

[AppleUser]

The menu works fine, but the other method involves "recovery mode". Turn phone off then press and hold volume up and home key and power key. Egton the phone vibrates release the power key and you'll end up in recovery. From there use the volume keys to select factory reset. Phone will reboot in its "new out of box" state. It will irretrievably delete all user data (pictures, music, accounts etc)

When you indicate "works fine" do you mean the erasure is just as secure as that recovery mode ? Which method restores the S4 to exactly the way it was shipped ?

 

[dynomot]

Great. Will do. What is "Egton the phone vibrates…." ?

When you indicate "works fine" do you mean the erasure is just as secure as that recovery mode ? Which method restores the S4 to exactly the way it was shipped ?

Lol, "Egton" is an awful typo for "until".

Both do exactly the same thing - restore the phone to its factory, first time out of the box settings. The "manual" one using the three button combo and recovery mode is used if the phone freezes, crashes or bootloops. A bootloop is a failure of the bootloader to initiate a boot of the OS. In non network variant Samsungs with pure Samsung firmware it manifests itself as the word "SAMSUNG" in white dimming and brightening forever on a black background until the battery goes flat, rather than for a few seconds before a boot up, or a couple of minutes after a factory reset. A manual "recovery" factory reset is the only one possible with a bootloop and cures it by resetting the phone so the corrupted/bad data is erased allowing the bootloader from continously trying to boot it, ie, what a bootloop is: trying to continuously boot bad data, normally from the cache partition.