Reviving A Bricked iPad

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Kate asked: “iPad Air 2 will not load past Apple start up screen. Attempted reset by holding in home and power button several times but still no luck. What is happening and how do I fix it?”

Kate, if you have an Apple Store around you, this would be a great time to give their Genius Bar service a chance, because the solution we’re going to offer involves wiping the iPad.

If you back up to iCloud, it probably won’t be much of an issue to you, but if you don’t, you may lose some stuff you may want to keep, so we’d give the Genius Bar a try in case they can rescue anything.

If you’re ready to deal with it yourself, you’re going to need a computer with iTunes and a little patience. You’ll need to place your iPad Air 2 in “DFU mode”. This is different from “recovery mode”, because it lets you restore your iPad to talk to iTunes directly instead of using a part of the OS — iBoot — that might be damaged in your case.

Make sure your iPad is completely turned off — hold down the power button as you have been to shut it off.

Next, plug the iPad into your PC or Mac. Run iTunes. If you’re on Windows and don’t have iTunes installed, download it from apple.com/itunes.

Hold down the power button for three seconds. Then, while still holding the power button down, hold the Home button down for ten seconds. Next, release the power button, but keep holding down the home button. If you’ve timed everything right, iTunes will say that it has detected a device in recovery mode (even if it isn’t technically), and allow you to completely restore your iPad.

If you’ve been keeping up with iCloud backups, you can re-load all of your data and apps after the iPad is revived. It’s highly unlikely that whatever caused your iPad to be “bricked” in the first place is part of your iCloud backup. But, if you want to be safe, simply setup your Air as a new iPad.