soledad penadés

Remember I told you the tablet I was given at Google I/O 2011 decided to kill itself a couple weeks ago? Well, I'm proud to announce that I've been able to resuscitate it!

I basically followed this guide, but with some differences. For the sake of posterity, and just in case the tablet decides to commit suicide again in the future, I'm going to write the steps I followed here:

1. Find the charger and allow the tablet to charge for a while
2. We need to put the tablet in FASTBOOT MODE. Press the POWER and VOLUME DOWN (the button closest to the power button) buttons for a while, until a screen with a yellow USB logo and a flashing Android icon shows up. If the tablet doesn't have enough battery power, this won't happen no matter how much time you wait.
3. Highlight the USB icon by pressing the VOLUME DOWN button once, and press VOLUME UP to select that option. You should be in fastboot mode now.
4. Now disconnect the tablet from the charger and connect it to the computer.
5. In a terminal, cd to the Android SDK/platform-tools directory
6. Run bash adb start-server
7. Run bash fastboot devices If you can't see any device listed here, that means your tablet wasn't recognised. Maybe you'll need to deal with Linux's udev rules, or if you're in Windows, install something called PDANet--refer to the original post for details. It worked for me without any extra software as I was using Mac OS for this step.
8. Now to reset the tablet and return it to a working, non-corrupt state: bash fastboot -w , where w stands for Wipe--which means that this will DELETE EVERYTHING in your tablet and return it to a stock state (Android 3.1).
9. A series of messages will appear on the tablet while it wipes things out. It gave me a FAIL message regarding something that it couldn't do, but I ignored it as there wasn't much more I could do
10. Press down the POWER button until it turns off, and then turn it on again (basically, reset the tablet).
11. Voilà, here's your tablet back to life!

Before we get more excited, here are the apparently non-harmful messages I got:

And the terminal output too:

$ ./fastboot -w
ERROR: could not get pipe properties
erasing 'userdata'...
OKAY [ 13.402s]
formatting 'userdata' partition...
Erase successful, but not automatically formatting.
Can't determine partition type.
OKAY [  0.001s]
erasing 'cache'...
ERROR: usb_write failed with status e00002ed
FAILED (command write failed (No such file or directory))
finished. total time: 13.409s

Leaving error messages apart, the tablet will ask you for your Google Account and all that, just as if you had just been given the tablet today and had just turned it on! After configuring everything, you get placed in a homescreen with what I believe is one of Romain Guy's desert pictures in the background, and a neatly ordered row of ancient icons on the bottom.

After a while, icons start disappearing, because the venerable Android Market app detects it's not meant to be called like that any more and it's Google Play now, and starts updating itself and asking to update more stuff, such as the Music app which then gets turned into Play Music, etc, etc. It's all a bit confusing --now you see it, now you don't!--, but since you've got a new tablet in your hands, you don't really care!!

Funny that I revived it on the night of the Fifth to the Sixth of January--which is when the Three King bring gifts to children in Spain!

To copy content back to the tablet (books and comics), I am using aafm as usual. I also took the opportunity to merge a pull request from iwiznia that should have been merged months ago, but well--consider it another gift from the Three Kings!