This is again a hard piece of information to find as most of the time you only get walked through this when talking to TAC. I found this written down in my IT journal. No idea why I haven’t posted it.
Resetting a phone to factory defaults is a good way to troubleshoot a phone that isn’t connecting or is messing up in various unexplained ways. Corrupt files being transferred from the FTP servers, network hiccups during start-up, power outages, caches not clearing and other issues can be resolved this way. TAC will usually make you do this when you have a screwed up phone before they recommend you warranty the phone.
Reset a ShoreTel Phone To Factory Defaults
Step 1 – Make sure the phone is not off hook, then press the mute button and release it. Nothing will happen.
Step 2 – Immediately dial the numbers “772667” and hit the pound key.
Note: If the keys make a noise and/or the numbers show up on the screen you’ve done it wrong and you’ll need to start over. Sometimes the phones don’t register the mute key press or if it’s really screwed up it might think it is off hook somehow.
Step 3 – Enter the phone password. This is usually 1234.
Some partners will change this in Director to keep their customers from messing up the phones. You can go change it back to whatever you want in Director and restart the phone. Unfortunately if the phone is screwed up it may not get this setting when rebooted. So it’s a good idea to know what this password is ahead of time.
Step 4 – The phone will reset into “KPD Mode”. Hit the mute button and dial “25327” and hit pound. You may or may not get a message here, but it should say “Clearing”.
Step 5 – Power cycle the phone.
The phone has now been cleared out and should re-download its settings from scratch so it may take a while to come back up. Please note that if you use the static IP method of phone configuration you’ll need to put all that stuff back in the phone.
15 replies on “How to Factory Reset a ShoreTel Phone”
Is there a way to invoke this remotely from a telnet to the phones CLI?
I haven’t found a way to do so yet, no. I did find some interesting commands in the CLI but none seem to actually clear anything out of the phone. I wonder if the dial commands start a script on the phone that does the factory reset.
[…] Factory Reset Your Phones – This is one that TAC will have you do if you call them for specific people having issues. Just refer to my article on factory resetting and you’ll be good. […]
This was useful4 me, thanks a lot!
This is absolutely not working. Shoretel must have changed the method. It’s simply not possible to enter this code.
On a IP480 phone this will not work for me either. Mute 77 then when you press the 2 it starts to dial.. Did you find a different method by chance?
I don’t know of any different method, no. Just from the posts here it seems that some phones might have a different method. I tend to doubt it since this information isn’t exactly unpublished.
these are brand new out of the box phones and all act the same. You press Mute 772 and once you hit the digit 2 it starts to collect digits like your trying to dial out. If you move the phone off the VLAN onto a total separate POE it just sits there and looks at you dumbfounded .. 🙁 all of the other shortcuts work but this one. Having issues trying to get the phones to load the new firmware… some grab it and some don’t for some reason. Just grabbing at straws to try and speed up the process a little. If you let them sit there for a long time eventually they restart on their own and grab the new version. But in the staging area don’t have space or time to let 100 phones just sit there waiting… have to have them 100% ready to be deployed before taking to the site per customer so don’t want to register some at one version and others at another and then take to site and have them do it there… Mrs. Customer will not be happy… lol
Thanks for your thoughts though… if I ever figure it out I will come back here and post it…
thanks again
David, I am sure by now you have found the solution but I am posting this for anyone else coming to this page. The IP480 uses a different code. Use [Mute] 73738# (RESET#) and it will post a screen asking to confirm the reset.
Cartman, I was able to use this method; it worked for me to reset the phone.
I did notice that the screen prompted me to press “#” for Yes at the end of step 2, and “*” for Yes at the end of step 4. I did not do step 5 (Power cycle the phone) because it started to re-download the settings after step 4.
This did not solve my user’s problem, which he lists as “screen sensitivity in the wrong place”, and may actually be due to fat fingering/sloppy selection of the on-screen options. My next step is to switch his phone with another user and see if the problem stays with the user, not with the hardware.
Yeah, since getting Cartman’s comment I’ve played around with the steps. Some phones seem to just reset on their own and others need the power cycle. I’m mostly around old 230’s in the different places that let me mess with their systems so that’s what I’m going off of. It could be version specific too. I did notice the same thing, that the phones are now asking for some #’s and *’s where they used to not. I will update this guide as soon as I get some more information.
If you have a touch screen phone and it has sensitivity in the wrong place, this is most likely a telephone problem and not serviceable in the field. I had this happen out of the box (or right after installation) with a Shoretel touch screen phone. TAC had me send it back and the replacement was fine.
It undoubtedly worked. I followed the instruction hours ago and since then my phone has been hanging on “Factory Test KPD Mode” for hours, is it dead or something I could do to get it back.
When you power cycled the phone it came back up into KBD Mode?
Midas, on one of the phones I reset I got a white screen when it rebooted. I don’t remember what it said in the upper left corner, but there were words.
The only way I could get it to continue to load was to press pound twice. ##
I hope you can get out of there.