Wednesday, January 18, 2017

LG Tablet Frozen on Firmware Update

I've been having a frustrating time with an LG tablet that I got from T-Mobile. The specific model that I have is the V496, also known as LG G Pad X 8.0. The steps to reproduce:

- battery drained completely, cannot be turned on because battery is at 0%
- plug in the tablet to charge
- screen displays (paraphrasing a bit): Firmware updating, do not unplug.
- screen displays a progress bar under the message and the progress bar never progresses

I am fairly certain I have figured out what was causing my issues, and perhaps maybe causing your issues. I was trying to charge from an outlet using the USB cable that came with my XBox. It never occurred to me this could be an issue until it was pointed out that the cable would not charge a Samsung phone. I think there is some extra electronic bits in the connector that is triggering the LG tablet (and possibly other LG equipment) to think it needs a firmware update.

That being said, my tablet was now stuck in an off state since it would not take a charge. To solve this part, I found my solution on this forum, which I will repeat below

  1. Unplug the tablet from the USB cable
  2. Find either a non-branded USB cable or the cable that came with the tablet. In my case, I'm pretty sure I am using the LG USB cable that came with either my LG phone or my LG tablet. Have this cable ready, i.e. one end of it should be plugged into a power source.
  3. Hold down the power button on the tablet for 10 seconds
  4. While still holding down the power, plug the tablet in and then let go of the power button
  5. You should see the outline of a large battery saying 0% for a second and the screen goes blank
  6. Leave the tablet plugged in to complete charging
Thanks for nothing Microsoft