[General Questions and Answers] red red robbo:
I've no idea if this works for all Android tablets/phones but it sounds like it should.

It might also be common knowledge to most on here but I couldn't find it earlier.

This is a story that happened to a work college of mine and three of us have just spent half the morning trying to sort it out. It starts with a cheap £50 tablet from Amazon, the LelikTec A13 Touch Screen AllWinner, which my college's son bought for his daughters. Being kids they did what kids do and mucked around with all the settings which resulted in them locking themselves out of the tablet (by setting up a pattern lock and then forgetting it).

Unfortunately, the tablet was locked with the WiFi turned OFF, so an attempt to use the useful Google recovery system was unsuccessful (tip for Google there, make the password recovery system so you can enable and setup a WiFi link). Never mind, you can perform a factory reset on Android devices by booting into recovery mode by pressing the up volume and power buttons at the same time. Well for some unexplained reason this didn't work, it simply resulted in the distressing image of a dead Android on the screen.

So the next thing to do is attempt to use the Android Debug Bridge via USB. Now between us we knew this is what we needed to do, but no one knew exactly how, so here is a beginners, step-by-step guide.

Download the ADB SDK from this website.

http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html

(If you have a 64 bit system then the top download button is all you need. If you have a 32 bit system then at the bottom of the webpage is "Download for other platforms" link and you can download the relevant software from here)

Install the ADB SDK so that it is on the c:\ drive (so that to navigate through it looks like c:\android-sdk\.....etc)

You now need to install the correct USB Drivers. If you navigate through to C:\android-sdk then you will see SDK Manager.exe.

Run up the SDK manager

Scroll through to Extras\Google USB Driver and check the box

Select Install packages. This will now have installed the usb drivers so that the development kit can talk to the tablet. (These drivers worked fine on a 64 bit machine but did not work on my 32 bit XP machine. I downloaded the drivers from here:-

http://www.kmods.net/android/misc_g59-usb_drivers_windows_7__vista__xp__32bit_p18.html

and they worked fine on the XP machine)

Close the SDK Manager

Now plug in the tablet to your PC using the USB cable supplied with the tablet.

Check the "DEVICE MANAGER" and you should see "ANDROID PHONE\Android ADB Interface"

(If you still have an unknown device then right click it navigate to "Update Driver" and then point it at the drivers USB drivers folder you may have downloaded earlier and update it)

This next step will make life a lot easier to unlock your tablet but take care in doing it.

a) Right Click "MY COMPUTER" and select properties\Advanced\Environment Variables

b) Scroll down until you see "Path" and select edit.

c) Add the following two lines to the end of the text making sure that you use ;(semicolon) between them.

e.g.C:\Program Files\WinNT\Bin\;c:\android-sdk\sdk\platform-tools\;c:\android-sdk\sdk\tools\

Now you all you have to do is follow the instructions on this website

http://www.addictivetips.com/androi...e-pattern-unlock-on-android-via-adb-commands/

As a brief summary:-

Goto ,<START> <RUN> and type in cmd

Cut this text:-

adb shell

cd /data/data/com.android.providers.settings/databases

sqlite3 settings.db

update system set value=0 where name='lock_pattern_autolock';

update system set value=0 where name='lockscreen.lockedoutpermanently';

.quit

and paste it into the cmd window.(You have to right click to paste into the CMD window)

If you now reboot your tablet you will find it unlocked. Re-connect it to the internet, type in your Gmail account details and away you go.

There may be other, easier ways of doing this, but this is what we did and this is what worked for us.

Apologies if this is in the wrong part of the forum, please feel free to move if so.