I know how to do a soft reset in settings but is there a way to hard reset Mi Box by doing some button hold during power cord insertion like they do on the Nexus Player. Think I heard something about toggling 2 remote buttons on Mi Box remote while inserting power cord to bring up the android recovery basic menu for doing the hard reset?
What do you mean by hard reset. A soft reset would be holding power button and hitting reboot. A hard reset would be unplugging it and replugging it back in.
Are you looking for a factory reset? That would delete everything and put your system back to out of the box settings. That is done through settings, storage & reset, factory data reset.
You can also do the same factory restore in that system recovery mode (what you were talking about). That menu is from unplugging the box, and hold OK and back buttons while plugging it in.
Edited to fix instructions. Thanks jasswolf.