acer a500 self bricked

[John.S]

Hello,
My a500 just out of warranty by 26 days is now a brick. The night befor it was working fine, and the next morning it would vibrate during the power on cycle, but the screen remained black. I have tried several suggested approches, none of which worked. I then reset the device hoping that it would restore itself back to normal, this only resulted in a black screen with the acer logo and nothing else.

Does anyone have any suggestion on how I might get ther tablet working again, or should I just chalk it up as a learning experience and buy a different brand of tablet.

Thanks,
John.S

 

[Frederuco]

Welcome to the forum!

I am pretty sure there should be a way to re-flash the stock ROM and get the tablet back booting. I am not that familiar with the Acer tablets myself, but someone who knows them will be along at some point to help you out. In the mean time I am moving this to the Acer A500 forum where the A500 users hang out.

 

[Mrhelper]

Hello,
My a500 just out of warranty by 26 days is now a brick. The night befor it was working fine, and the next morning it would vibrate during the power on cycle, but the screen remained black. I have tried several suggested approches, none of which worked. I then reset the device hoping that it would restore itself back to normal, this only resulted in a black screen with the acer logo and nothing else.

Does anyone have any suggestion on how I might get ther tablet working again, or should I just chalk it up as a learning experience and buy a different brand of tablet.

Thanks,
John.S

If your device is stock and you have not attempted to flash a ROM, interrupted an OTA system update (you would know if you did this), and you have not otherwise modified the ROM (as root), then the problem you describe appears to be a hardware failure, and most who encounter this (and actually fix it) do so by replacing the main board.

If this was caused by a botched flash operation, there are links to full stock ROM images and instructions here: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1816560. Selection of a given image depends on which stock version the device was running. For the problem described above though, it does not appear that flashing a ROM image will be of any value.

 

[biking4jesus]

I have this same issue. Stock ROM that has been long updated to ICS with no issues. Nothing unusual was going on. The tab was powered on with TuneIn running, and it suddenly shut off never to revive. The ACER logo is all I can get. I've tried all of the exotic resets and power ups with no results. It is out of warranty. Is there any point in trying tech support. (I'm thinking of replaying it with an A700. Is that a bad idea?) My Lenovo is taking up most of the slack, while the A500 is AWOL, but there is some app data on the internal SD that I would really like to retrieve. Is there any way to do that without booting the tablet?

 

[Mrhelper]

...there is some app data on the internal SD that I would really like to retrieve. Is there any way to do that without booting the tablet?

There is no practical way to do that, and it seems more than possible that NAND chip wear may be the culprit anyway, so the storage may actually be what failed.

 

[Frederuco]

The only shot you have at recovering data from a bricked tablet is if you can boot to APX mode (not sure how to do this for the A500) or if you have a custom recovery that allows ADB traffic and install the Android SDK on your computer and an ADB driver.

Then you could use the command adb pull /sdcard/ c:\sdcard\ to pull everything from the internal memory. This would take a while to do, but may be worth a shot if you can get into APX mode and get an ADB driver.