Failed to write system.img in fastboot. is my Nexus 7 (2012) dead?

[AlexMaiden]

Hi everyone, its me again.

after a few weeks with a very lagged and problematic Lollipop 5.0 in my Nexus 7 (2012) it finally froze up again. however this time instead of using ADB or the Nexus Unified Toolkit i went to recovery mode to do a factory reset.

It went really wrong. The factory reset came up with some weird errors and ended up in "E: cant mount/ cache
E:Can't open/cache/recovery/log
E:Can't mount /cache/recovery/last_log

after that, the divice eventually came into the reset. However it did not booted. it froze up while updating apps so i decided to flash normally with ADB.

However, once i was flashing a new ROM from the google servers, it started giving me a lot of problems. Sometimes it fails to send the flashing images, sometimes fails to write them, and sometimes states insufficient memory and i it constantly fails to send the System image. Something like this

checking product...
OKAY [ 0.031s]
checking version-bootloader...
OKAY [ 0.016s]
sending 'boot' (4944 KB)...
OKAY [ 0.686s]
writing 'boot'...
FAILED (remote: (FileWriteFailed))
finished. total time: 5.210s

i can go into fastboot, i can get into recovery mode however i cant seem to properly flash a new ROM. i have tried switching usb ports, cables, restarting the pc, using different programs and i sort of get the same problems over and over again.

any ideas here? thanks.

 

[Rukbat]

Assuming that you're connecting directly to the PC, not through a USB hub (most hubs won't handle large file transfers), it sounds as if some of system storage went bad. That would be a hardware problem.

If I were you, I'd head over to Nexus 7 Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting - XDA Forums and ask (after searching first) if anyone's run into the problem and, if so, managed to fix it. Sometimes some strange firmware problem looks like a hardware failure. The devs over there have the phone, and probably have each bricked theirs many times, so they'd know if the problem you have has any chance of being recovered from and, if so, how to do it (and where to get any files you might need).