It was working perfectly fine until it just randomly became unresponsive and then eventually tried to reboot itself. I’ve tried restarting it multiple times and plugging it in to my computer but neither of those did anything. I don’t care if it doesn’t work anymore but I’d like to recover the files if possible, any ideas?
I couldn’t take a good picture of it but I did take one:
Edit: As far as I can tell, I can’t get it working nor can I recover the files on it. I’m not losing much, as there is nothing important on it but it’s just weird that it was working perfectly fine and then stopped work almost immediately. But it’s fine, it’s over 10 years old at this point, I had a feeling something like this would happen.
Unfortunately, file recovery is unlikely. Most systems today have locked bootloaders and encryption by default for userdata. If you can’t get into the main OS, the data is typically lost.
With that said, you mentioned this is older hardware. Have you tried booting it with different combinations of power + volume buttons held to see if you can reach a bootloader menu?
I just tried it and there is something called “droidboot”. There are four options “reboot droidboot”, “reboot”, “recovery” and “power off”. Should I try the recovery option?
Recovery sounds promising! Let’s see what happens.
I don’t claim to be an expert by any means but it’s better than a logo screen.
Here’s some screenshots of that menu: https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Tablets-and-Mobile-Devices-Archive-Read-Only/My-HP-7-1800-tablet-is-not-fully-booting-up/td-p/7712791
Thanks for the info. It looks like user might have a shot at recovering the device but I don’t see how they’d get data recovery from this position.
I tried it and it just takes me back to the USB logo. It’s fine if I can’t recover the files, I wont lose much.
There might be a way to restore firmware from here:
https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Tablets-and-Mobile-Devices-Ready-Only/Need-the-Firmware-file-for-HP-7-1800-Tablet/m-p/6972946
But aside from that, I think I’m out of further ideas.
Unfortunatly, that wont work because I can’t get into the recovery menu.
Interesting. Do you have it plugged into something that might be putting it in some kind of file transfer mode? I think this logo is different from the usual vendor logo. I also wonder if maybe this is your recovery mode and it doesn’t offer a GUI. This doesn’t seem to match screenshots that I can find online regarding the recovery mode of this tablet.
We could also try to talk to it over USB via fastboot, but that might be hairy and may still not lead anywhere.
When I plugged it in to my computer, it didn’t show up in the list of connected devices. I can try using fastboot but I have no idea what that is, can I use Linux or would I have to use Windows?
I would expect it to show up as some kind of USB device on Linux, but alas. I’m starting to think she might be dead because I found a few cases like yours in the HP support forums where they concluded there must be hardware problem.
Yeah, it used to mount immediately after connecting but it doesn’t even show up at all anymore.
One online source suggests holding power and vol up will get off that logo screen. I’m not sure though.
That doesn’t because it just takes me back to droidboot.