Without any fuss, if you are sure what Hard resent does, open your Samsung mobile’s Keypad and type *2767*3855#. Be informed that there won’t be any warning, as soon as you enter the last ‘#’, your phone goes into Hard reset mode.
Now, if you’d rather want to know what hard reset does, it’ll simply erase ALL data and will present you with a phone that you saw when you Unboxed it for the first time. However, if you upgraded your firmware in this period, your latest OS will prevail, every thing else gets’ deleted. So take back up of your Apps, Contacts, Messages (see how to backup SMS in Android) and other files before you do a Hard reset.
If you don’t want to go this far, there’s a factory reset option that will be there on most phones as an option under settings. This is a soft reset and will erase all your Apps, System files, Messages, Contacts etc but will keep your Media files such as Pictures, Songs, Videos and some Apps data. You will need to delete these App data after soft reset since these are no longer useful.
In both cases, Carrier branded Apps and Apps specially installed by Samsung (such as Layar, Swype etc) won’t be deleted.
Note: Both these methods were tested on a Samsung Galaxy S.
Also see: Android Mass Storage mode fix.
