Last night at the Motörhead show my iPhone crapped out on me… again.

So much for getting pictures.

I actually had taken a couple pictures of The Sword.

I intentionally left the phone on “Camera” so I could take more pictures, especially of the Motörhead performance. But then I pull out the phone, press buttons and no response. Damnit. I fiddle with all the buttons I can, and nothing. The phone, she’s dead. Last time this happened to me I had done a similar thing: the phone was likely left on an application, I put the phone into my back pocket, pull it out and she’s dead. That time I had plugged in the phone and eventually saw the battery come alive with almost no charge… so the battery had run down. I figured that’s what happened here so I just forgot about it until I got home.

However when I got home and plugged in the phone for a while, it didn’t come back. Uh oh. I Googled about it and apparently this is not an uncommon problem. The solution?

A hard reset.

Press the power button and home button together and hold… you might have to hold for a little while (30-60 seconds?), but eventually you should see the Apple logo on screen. When you do, it’ll churn away and eventually you go about your business. I did have about 70% battery left, which means some battery was drained but not everything.

Digging deeper into my ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporer/MobileDevice/ folder of my sync machine, it looks like the phone had a kernel panic.

Ah… modern computing.

Anyway, now that I know about the hard reset, next time this happens I’ll try that and see how it goes.