Blue screen of death

I woke this morning to find that my relatively new Nokia Lumia had stayed on the blue pre-boot screen all night whilst plugged in to charge from empty. Alas, no amount of pressing the power button or popping out the battery or even - in desperation - popping out the SIM gave a different result: the Nokia logo would appear, followed by the blue screen and no Windows and eventually a shutdown.

Frustrated after twenty minutes I resorted to Google. What I found is that my problem was not unique. Nokia 920s and 520s appear to have this common weakness. I found one useful post which outlined how to complete a reset of the device. Apparently it doesn't always work, but it did on my 520.

Fortunately I had already configured my device to backup to the cloud. As a result, as part of the system restore, I was prompted if I wanted to restore the phone image and my configuration and applications automagically came down.

So, if you're in need of resetting your Nokia Windows phone, you can read the discussion thread I found or simply:

1. Disconnect your phone from the charger.
2. Press and hold the volume down key and connect the charger. An exclamation mark (!) is shown on the screen. 
3. Press the following keys in order: volume up, volume down, power, volume down.

Your phone resets and boots up automatically. This may take several minutes. After it reboots you will see a pair of cogs cycling. Different users report having lengthy wait times from this point but mine was done in a couple of minutes.

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