Force Resetting iPads that are on Single App Mode

By | September 26, 2017

What will you do if your Mac broke down and your Apple Configurator setup is in there? You have no option as the hard drive crashed on you.  Then suddenly you just remembered you have several iPads that are managed by that Mac and you want to remove the single app mode on those iPads, plugging them in and resetting the content will give you that pairing error to the sound of

An unexpected error has occurred with these X iPads.

Pairing is prohibited by a policy on the device. [com.apple.configurator.MobileDeviceKit.amd.error – 0xFFFFFFFFE800009A (-402653030) [sys = 0x3A, sub = 0x0, code = 0x9A (154)]]

I know you are desperate as I was in a similar situation when our Mac hard drives failed on us


Luckily there is a mode on iPad that you can break out of Single App mode by pressing the Sleep + Home for 15 seconds, it then restarts the iPad.  But before doing so make sure you plug in your iPad on to the Mac via USB so once it reboots it will go to this screen otherwise it will just go back to the single app mode.

Once this happens you don’t need to follow what it says and go to iTunes because you will get an error that says

This iPad is supervised by another computer and cannot be used with this computer


What you need to do is open the Apple Configurator 2

Then go to the iPad context menu, choose Advanced then Erase All Contents and Settings


It will then tell you they are not booted, just choose “Restore

It will then download iOS on those devices, unzips them

then re-installs the iOS


be patient and wait, you don’t need to do anything at this point.

Minutes later your iPads will be back in its factory setting

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