Resetting Blackberry Q10 to Factory Defaults

I decided to sell one of my Blackberry Q10 phones that I had since getting my Blackberry Passport and having a spare Blackberry Q10 as a backup "keyboard" phone. I had used my Blackberry Q10 phone for approximately 1.5 years before opting to sell it and the internal memory on the device was almost completely used (~14.5GB of 16GB). I also had a 2GB microSD memory card in the device.

I generally encrypt my devices and with my Blackberry Q10 (and the 2GB microSD memory card inside it), I encrypted both as well. Before selling my device, I needed to reinitialize it back to factory defaults.

The first step to doing this since I wanted to keep the information on the microSD memory card was to unencrypt the microSD card. Forgetting this step would mean that the information on the microSD card would be permanently encrypted. To unencrypt the microSD memory card, I went into the Settings menu, Encryption, and then turned off the Media Card encryption. My microSD memory card was not completely filled (and it was only a 2GB microSD memory card on top of that and not a 32GB memory card) so the amount of time that it took me to unencrypt the memory card was not too long. After the memory card was unencrypted so that I wouldn't forget it in the phone when I sold it, I ejected it from my Blackberry Q10.

The next thing that I did was to issue the command to reinitialize my Blackberry Q10. As mentioned, I used my Blackberry Q10 for approximately 1.5 years and the amount of free memory on the device was a little over 1GB (and my Blackberry Q10 was encrypted). I wasn't sure how long it would take so I kept my Blackberry Q10 plugged into the electrical outlet and initiated the reinitialization process.

It took roughly 7 hours for my Blackberry Q10 to reinitialize itself. During that time, the Blackberry Q10 was completely unusable and I was somewhat worried since for a large portion of that time, it appeared as if wasn't doing anything. About 2 hours into the reinitialization process, since I wasn't sure how long it would take, I decided that I would go to bed and hopefully it would be done by the time I woke up. However, it wasn't finished by the time I woke up. I then decided to unplug the Blackberry Q10 from the AC outlet and bring it with me to work. When I arrived at work, I looked at the Blackberry Q10 screen and it had finished reinitializing itself. The total amount of time between when I started the reinitialization process of my Blackberry Q10 and when I looked at my Blackberry Q10 was ~7 hours so I was lucky that I had decided not to reinitialize it in front of the seller or start the reinitialization process at work since I was meeting the buyer during my lunch.

One of the reasons it might have taken ~7 hours to reinitialize my Blackberrry Q10 to factory defaults is because my Blackberry Q10 was encrypted and only ~1GB of free memory (out of ~16GB) existed on the device.

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