How to fix your Nexus 7 bootloop
The Nexus 7 is a great piece of kit, but some units suffer from a crippling bug that is very simple to fix but can lead you to bash your face against a hard thing in frustration.
If you let the device’s battery run down to absolute zero, it’ll power off like a good little piece of electronics to prevent the lithium polymer battery from exploding.
Unfortunately, in some units, this leads to the battery dipping below baseline voltage and results in the device trying to power on when connected to mains power, running “out of battery” and hard shutting down with a terrifying sound of white noise from the speaker and static on the screen.
Thankfully, this isn’t actually indicative of Snow Crash infecting your slab.
To fix this issue, follow these simple steps:
Plug your device in to the mains charger
When it powers on and tries to boot, hold down the volume down and power keys until it reboots to the recovery mode screen that looks like this:
Hit volume down until you see “Power off Device”
Press the power button to confirm. The device will power down.
Unplug the mains charger and plug it back in. The device should now show the charging battery symbol. Leave it there for 10 minutes to get up a baseline charge, then power on as normal.