A reader chided me for giving up too easily with my semi-bricked Nexus 7. I decided to see if I could reflash it myself. I downloaded a set of tools from
and installed them. The main window is fairly comprehensive.
At first, the program couldn’t find my Nexus 7, but after I uninstalled the drivers, re-installed from the tool’s driver installation window, and rebooted the laptop that I was running the tool on, it could see the Nexus 7. Picking the “Flash stock and unroot” option yielded a runtime error:
I guess the tool is not fully debugged.
Trying again, I achieved partial success, but the flash failed because the bootloader on the Nexus 7 was locked.
I could see that it was locked on the “Android on its back with its stomach open” bootloader start screen, but I couldn’t change it, no matter how many times I restarted.
I decided to try something more drastic. The tool warned me that I was taking a risk:
And warned me again when I persisted:
But the result was the same:
I guess if I can’t unlock the bootloader, I can’t flash the Nexus 7.
That’s two hours of my life that I’ll never get back.
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