[Nexus 7 Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] GedBlake:
Hello again, Jagutherrschaften...

Sorry for taking so long to get back to you, but I've been really busy with non-Android stuff all day.

Before I signed off XDA early this morning, (Fri, UK time)... and before you posted your explanation of how you got into your undesirble predicament, I was trying to think why your Nexus 7 is attempting to boot into CWM. It's something I've never seen before... it occurred to me, CWM may have been incorrectly flashed to the boot partition, instead of the recovery partition. This would go some way to explaining why your Nexus 7 is attempting to boot into CWM instead of normal Android.

So in an attempt to replicate your situation, I fastboot flashed CWM on my Nexus 7, to the boot partition with...

fastboot flash boot recovery-clockwork-touch-6.0.3.8-grouper.img

...instead of (and correctly)...

fastboot flash recovery recovery-clockwork-touch-6.0.3.8-grouper.img

Upon completion of this flash, I hit START (from the bootloader)... and as expected my Nexus 7 booted into the Google logo, and then directly into CWM.

...but it didn't bootloop as depicted in your video, it just ran CWM as normal..

I booted several times into CWM, but no bootloop. (It's kind of weird having two custom recoveries installed... there's an option in CWM to restart Recovery, which upon tapping, my N7 booted straight into TWRP !, which is my Custom Recovery of choice. And resides correctly in the recovery partition. I had to make a conscious effort to reboot as normal, in order to boot into CWM).

Anyway, more puzzled more than ever, I fastboot flashed the Jellybean 4.3 stock boot .img back to it's rightful place, rebooted the tablet, to make sure everything was working as normal, and went to bed.

Later, after you posted, I re-read it many times (and took a look at the links), and re-watched your video several more times (by the way, Nandroid backups don't backup the bootloader), and nothing occurred to me; no 'euraka' ! moment:(.

The bootloader is obviously still intact... if it wasn't, then your Nexus 7 wouldn't boot at all. Besides, it's there, visible, with the unlocked padlock symbol !

I'm inclined to tentatively agree with your assessment that ROM Manager screwed something up. I haven't used ROM Manager for ages, due to known issues on my Advent Vega. And on the Nexus 7, I just use fastboot. On the Vega, you use a command called flash_image to flash images, and is syntactically very similar to fastboot.

Sticking with my Vega for a moment... some users are unable to boot into CWM at all. And nobody seems to know why. But a while ago, somebody did some research into this problem, and it was speculated that on some Vegas there are BAD NAND BLOCKS (like bad sectors on a hard drive, only on a chip instead) in the MISC partition, where a binary state flag is set, telling the tablet to boot into Recovery instead of Android.

Now it's a bit a leap... and hugely speculative... but I wonder if the MISC partition on your Nexus 7 may have become corrupted... ?POSSIBLY? as a result of using ROM Manager... and that is telling the tablet to boot into Recovery instead of Android.

This is a far from satisfactory explanation, though, for several reasons...

* I'm not sure how far you can extrapolate the partition structures of one completely different tablet to another completely different tablet.

* It doesn't explain why your tablet is bootlooping and mine didn't (after replacing the stock boot.img with the CWM recovery .img in the boot partition.

* And finally... I'm still baffled why VOL DOWN+POWER ON doesn't break out of the bootloop and boot directly into the bootloader. Everything I know about the Nexus 7 tells me that this should happen... and it's always been the case, that as long as you can access the bootloader, the tablet is recoverable.

I'm afraid I have nothing else to suggest or try... other than what you've tried already.

I can only offer my apologies that I was unable to assist you... maybe somebody with more technical expertise might offer some new insight or suggestions.

Rgrds,

Ged.