Sunday 3 July 2016

Unbricking an Asus TF101?



Hi all,

Ok, so I have a weird problem with my Asus TF101 that for the life of me I can't seem to solve myself. Which is why I finally decided to ask for help.

To make a long story short: About two years ago I bought a used TF101 that I have been very happy with so far. And I definitely don't want to give it up, as it's been working fine until a few weeks ago. Then those boot loops (that everybody seems to be talking about) started and I was able to revive the device once by leaving it plugged off for a few days until the battery was empty (thus, I think, forcing a clearing of some kind of cache) and then re-booting it. Unfortunately, this does not seem to work anymore.

My TF101 has been rooted by the guy that owned it before. It features TWRP in version 2.2.1.4 and an older KatKiss ROM. Now, my situation is as follows:
  • Boot loops are preventing me from getting past the boot screen. I can thus not install or use any apps.

  • I can enter TWRP recovery mode and I could wipe the device, but I cannot find any ROM on the internal memory.

  • When connecting the TF101 to the computer (I'm using Linux Mint 17.3) it doesn't show up as disk. Only when unplugging it again, an error shows up on the Linux screen saying that the TF101 could not be connected. This is preventing me from loading a new ROM onto the device via a cable.

  • The device doesn't seem to recognize an SD card (32GB), no matter if formatted as FAT32 or as EXT3, with or without SWAP. So, in the TWRP file manager I cannot access an external SD card to load and flash a ROM.

  • When I enter "Mount" in the TWRP menu, I can't seem to switch to "Using external SD": When doing that I get an error "E:failed to mount /sdc (No such file or directory)" in the terminal window.


I have been reading forums up and down, but can't seem to find any helpful advice that applies in my case. I'm guessing the boot loop would disappear, if I could flash a new ROM, but I don't know how to put that on the device. Also, in case some of the problems are caused by version of TWRP that is installed, I would like to update that... but, again, I don't know how to get the new version on the device. I thought about entering APX mode, but holding Power and Vol+ simply turns my display black after a few seconds... no sounds, no beeps, nothing showing up on my desktop.

Any ideas? Pretty please?
Any help would be much appreciated.
Thanks in advance.



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