Hard reseting a WM5 device

[csmajor98]

Got my upgrade yesterday for my x50v and during the install of one application the Dell boot screen froze at about 80%. So I let it sit for 10 minutes or so and nothing happened. Soft resetted a few times and still the boot screen would not go away. So I decided to do a hard reset. The message that comes up states that it will restore the devie to factory settings and therefore erase everything. Umm, ok... So I hard reseted since I felt I had no other course of action. And of course when the device came back up EVERYTHING was erased. I thought the whole point of the OS was that I would be able to do a hard reset and still have my data... At least my PIM related data would have been great, I can reinstall and resetup all my applications... But everything gone? Am I going crazy in thinking that I read/heard somewhere that performing a hard reset would NOT lose all the data on the device?

[Gigi]

A manual hard reset will always bring the device back to factory state, regardless of Operating System. However, in WM5 if your battery drains, your device will NOT do a hard reset like it would with WM2003SE and below. That is where persistent memory comes in.

About your PIM data, can't you just resync? Everything should still be on your desktop Outlook.

[atariguy33]

I belive it's when the battery goes dead that you won't loose anything.

[csmajor98]

Guess I just misread something somewhere.. Was hoping that it wasn't true, but oh well! At least the OS upgrade went in without a hitch. Thanks everyone.

[gwinter]

In WM2003SE, you also have the Build-In Storage. Anything that you put into that folder will not be deleted when you hard reset, because the OS will not touch it, just like the OS won't go ahead and format your storage card when hard resetting.

In WM5, the OS has control over all the ROM area when you put in your data. Hard reset would instruct the OS to also clear out all the data that you put in.

If the system were to work like you said, ie. hard reset but user data remains, think about what you have to do if you want to sell your device to someone else. You'd have to manually delete everything, and even then there might still be database files left around that you cannot see normally.