Nexus 7 (2012) in a Bad Way

[shepherd_wood]

Hey, Guys; I'm worried that my Nexus 7 may be dead. I've been having some serious trouble with it since the 4.4.2 update. Basically, it would shut down routinely whenever it went into sleep mode. I was able to get it working a bit better by flashing stock back on the tablet, but after another month, it went downhill fast. I tried another system restore, but the system restore wasn't successful. I ended up with the Red Triangle/Exclamation Point message. Now, every time I try to boot the tablet, it shows the Android "Deleting" message that appears when first attempting to restore to factory default, but it doesn't progress. I've tried the standard method to get it into download mode (ie: hold power and up and down volume when booting), but it keeps getting stuck in the "Deleting" message.

So, basically, I'm trying to determine if this thing is irretrievably bricked. I was able to get a cheap 8 GB model from a developer friend, but I'd really like to have the 32 GB up and running if I can. My plan was to get the 2014 Nexus 7 (whenever it's announced), and hand this one down to my wife or daughter.

UPDATE: I had some free time today, so I was able to tinker with it some more. It's now up and running again, but it's still shutting down if it goes to sleep. I'm assuming this problem is something a bit deeper than I'm used to dealing with. Maybe a kernel problem? But now I'm talking a bit out of my depth.

 

[dancing-bass]

Are you comfortable with using ADB commands? I'm not, so I "cheat" and use Wug's Toolkit. I've had a similar situation with my Galaxy Nexus (accidently wiped the OS. Oooops).

Anyway, you can use that to totally restore it back to stock - flashing the factory image and completely wiping every shred of data on there. If you do that and re-lock the bootloader it will be back to "out of the box" factory-stock, at least software-wise. That doesn't fix any possible hardware problems, but software-wise it will be.

Of course, back up any important data on there (files, pictures, etc) that you want to keep.

 

[shepherd_wood]

Are you comfortable with using ADB commands? I'm not, so I "cheat" and use Wug's Toolkit. I've had a similar situation with my Galaxy Nexus (accidently wiped the OS. Oooops).

Anyway, you can use that to totally restore it back to stock - flashing the factory image and completely wiping every shred of data on there. If you do that and re-lock the bootloader it will be back to "out of the box" factory-stock, at least software-wise. That doesn't fix any possible hardware problems, but software-wise it will be.

Of course, back up any important data on there (files, pictures, etc) that you want to keep.

I'd planned on trying this, but during some research, I read about some success using Safe Mode. So, I booted it into Safe Mode, and it booted up without trouble. After several hours, it still hadn't reset, but I did receive an odd alert/notification: "An Application Attempted a Bad..." Sadly, I couldn't read it all, but when I clicked on it, it took me to the Date/Time section of Settings. Since then, the error message hasn't recurred. After several more hours, I reset the tablet normally and uninstalled Helium (I previously had it installed with Root permissions, and my tablet didn't have Root anymore). Ever since, the random resetting hasn't recurred. Hopefully, this solved my problem. I wish I could say I understood what happened, but at least it's working now!