Regardless of how revolutionary the hardware within the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S is, we all know that, at some point, a hard restart will be necessary to escape a locked or frozen console.
Equally, many players will also find that down the line, the Xbox Series X|S will become so stuffed with content that resetting to factory settings with a hard reset is the best course of action.
To perform a hard restart of your Xbox Series X or S, you need to:
- Make sure that your Xbox Series X or S is locked or frozen by waiting for a few minutes;
- If the Xbox remains frozen, press and hold the Xbox button on the console;
- Keep holding the button down until the light goes out and the Xbox Series X|S turns off.
It’s essential that you press and hold the button down until the console has switched off when trying to hard restart; releasing it too soon may just activate sleep mode on the Xbox Series X or S.
To perform a hard reset of your Xbox Series X or S, you need to:
- Press the Xbox button on your controller, go to ‘Profile & system’ (on the right side), and select ‘Settings;’
- Move to ‘System’ and then select ‘Console info;’
- On the ‘System Console info’ page, click on ‘Reset console;’
- Should you want to perform a full, hard reset of your Xbox Series X or S, choose ‘Restart and Remove Everything.’
Opting to hard reset your Xbox will remove all of your information, games, and apps from the console.
It will take some time for the Xbox Series X or Xbox Series S to perform the hard reset, but once it’s complete, you’ll be able to start again from its original factory settings.
Using the steps above, you can perform an Xbox Series X|S hard restart to escape a frozen screen or get back to the Xbox Series X|S factory settings with a hard reset.
