Ubuntu de-bricked my Android Jelly Bean Touchpad

I was just about ready to throw away my favorite tablet.

This past week I thought my Android Touchpad had finally given up the ghost. I was out in San Francisco for the RSA Conference. I shut down my Touchpad just prior to my plane landing at SFO. It had plenty of battery left when I shut down, but when I tried to turn it back on in my hotel later it would not boot at all. Dead, dark, finished. I plugged it into the charger and after a few hours it seemed to be fine. It booted right back up.

The next day, though, I shut it down again to take it to the show floor with me. When I went to turn it back on in the press room again it was dead. This time, no matter what I did, nothing helped, it stayed dead.

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I brought it back to my hotel room that afternoon and plugged it into the charger. I kept it plugged in charging all week and still nothing. I came home yesterday and tried everything I could think of, and again nothing worked. I finally came to the realization that my Touchpad was done. What was I to do? I did what any geek confronted with the same thing would. I started looking at Amazon for deals on 10.1-inch Android tablets (I still like the Google Nexus). I also considered spending the thousand bucks for a Surface Pro (that passed quickly). I was bummed about my Touchpad, but excited to go buy a new tablet.

As readers of my blog know, I am a big fan of CyanogenMod running on my rooted HP Touchpad WebOS tablet. Over the last year plus, I have had tablet envy every time a new Android pad comes out. But each and every time, a refresh of my Touchpad brings me back to my trusty HP.

Before pulling the trigger on a new tablet I tried one last thing. As a last resort I decided to go into CyanogenMod Touchpad developer extraordinaire, JC Sullins "TPDebrick 004 thread" on the Rootzwiki site. JC had started a whole thread on some work he had done in bringing bricked Touchpads back to life. Actually, when rooting them, it is not uncommon for a Touchpad to get bricked. It seems that if you let the battery run down, sometimes they won't charge back up at all. So JC Sullins had come up with some fixes. A series of scripts he wrote could help sometimes. But there was a warning that this could also result in your Touchpad being bricked, if it wasn't already. While scary, I figured I had nothing to lose and would give it a try.

A quick look discouraged me, though, because while JC is a wizard and if anyone could help it would be him, you needed to run the de-brick scripts on an Ubuntu machine. I have Windows, Android, Mac and iOS in the house, but no Linux. The idea of setting up a dual-boot machine to take a long shot at fixing this old Touchpad just sounded like too much work.

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