Bring an Android phone or tablet with bad SSD back to life

Laptops, Notebooks, PDA's, MP3 Players, Cell Phones
Post Reply
User avatar
FlyingPenguin
Flightless Bird
Posts: 32773
Joined: Wed Nov 22, 2000 11:13 am
Location: Central Florida
Contact:

Bring an Android phone or tablet with bad SSD back to life

Post by FlyingPenguin »

I have an old Nexus 9 the wife never used and when I fired it up the other day, it was extremely unstable: kept crashing, hanging, apps would randomly crash. A factory reset didn't help.

Memory seemed fine so I suspected the NAND storage (SSD) was corrupt and had weak cells.

Now there's no easy way to run a sector scan or Spinrite on an Android device, but there does seem to be an alternative way to do a factory reset that also formats each cell on the SSD and, in my case anyway, it seems to have brought it back to life.

Instead of using the "Factory Reset" option in the boot menu, which does a regular factory reset, you go into the Recovery Mode menu and choose "Wipe Data/Factory Reset". This seems to erase every byte on the SSD before creating a fresh install of Android. It takes longer but it seemed to allow the internal CRC correction to swap out and refresh any bad cells on the SSD.

This is how you do it on a Nexus tablet:

Turn off the Nexus
Press and hold Volume Down and then press and hold Power until the tablet turns on. You should see the word “start”
Press Volume Down twice to highlight Recovery Mode. Press Power to confirm your selection
Hold down the Power button and press and release the Volume Up button once
Press Volume Down twice to highlight Wipe Data / Factory Reset and press Power to confirm
Press Volume Down seven times to highlight Yes - Erase All User Data. Once again, press Power to confirm
After the reset is finished, reboot your device.
"Turns out I’m 'woke.' All along, I thought I was just compassionate, kind, and good at history. "

Image
Post Reply