Two days ago, I got this hit. Probably because I had installed too many apps, or hoarded too much stuff in there. I checked the memory, it was less than 50MB free at one time, then I tried to clean up a little bit, make it about 250MB, but eventually, maybe combined with the low battery situation, my iPad stopped working.
The symptom was like this: it only showed a white Apple logo on the black background, nothing else. I could turn it off by holding the Power button (on right upper side) and Home button (just below the screen) simultaneously, then it went total black. If I push the Power button again, it would show the logo again. There was no third status, even after I tried some other tricks like hold the side volumn button for 5 minutes (upper or down).
I got this iPad mini about four and a half years ago, it is always in good shape, although the memory space is always an issue. Something annoying is that no more OS upgrade on this hardware but the App Store keeps pushing update apps for the newest OS 11. Anyway, I still want to use my iPad mini for a while. So I start looking for solutions.
One of the them I found working was according to this Apple KB – https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT201263, also this article gave me quite some confidence – https://www.lifewire.com/ipad-recovery-mode-stuck-at-apple-logo-1994540
So this is what I did to revive my iPad mini.
- Have a computer installed with iTunes, update it to the latest version, and login with your Apple id.
- Connect the iPad cable to the USB port on the computer, only the USB end, don’t connect the Lightning end yet.
- Turn off iPad using both Power button and Home button, it should go total black.
- Hold the Home button, you may see the Apple logo come back again, still hold it, and connect the Lightning connector, keep holding, until you see an iTunes logo on the screen with a cable going to it. This means the iPad is not dead yet, you can release the Home button now.
- On your computer, you should see some message update in iTunes, such as it is connecting to an iPad with serial number, memory status, etc. That’s good news.
- The next thing you will see is it prompts you for the next action, because the iPad is not in a very good shape – probably the OS is messed up. There are two options – Update or Restore. I chose Update first, which is some minor repair that won’t wipe out all user data.
- On the top of iTunes, you will see the status and progress – downloading, updating, waiting, etc. My first try failed, it showed me the logo again, so I followed on-screen instructions rebooted both my computer and iPad, repeated steps 2 ~ 7. This time it’s much faster, no downloading , only extracting, etc, and I even saw a grey progress bar under the Apple logo on my iPad. But in the end, it failed again.
- So, I disconnected my iPad, closed and restarted iTunes, and this time I would choose Restore, which is factory restore. I knew I would lose all my data on the iPad, it was ‘dead’ anyway. I still had my backup in iCloud, which shows last backup was done four days ago, not too bad.
- So, I repeated steps above from 2 to 6, and on step 6, I chose Restore and confirmed several times. The iTunes showed the restore progress, then the iPad showed the progress as well in grey bar under the logo. After a little while, it seemed everything was settled down, the iPad went black.
- I gently pushed the home button, the screen went pale and showed “Hello …”
- So, my iPad is back again, like new, and I am happy. Then I waited a bit, with WiFi connection, it should automatically restore as much information as possible from the iCloud.
That was the adventure with my iPad recently, besides that I was not so fortunate trying to revive my Sony reader a few years ago, and reset my BlackBerry Classic early this year went okay, although it started having issues with file manager and language input method lately. Overall, Apple is still the most user-friendly, and I could try the last resort in Apple store, not sure if they would fix out-of-warranty device for free.
Happy Thanksgiving!