[Galaxy Tab 2 Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] LMurphy:
Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 Hacked, Touchscreen unresponsive

Hi! I need help with my tablet.

Device: Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 Tablet, model GT-P5113 TS. This model doesn't have a way to yank out the battery.

What's wrong: Touchscreen is not responding.

Current state: Attempting to drain the battery. Doesn't appear to be turned on. Factory reset apparently performed.

What happened: Sorry, this is long. It is as best as I can remember it. It may be somewhat inaccurate.

Yesterday evening, I was on my Windows laptop and logged into my Google account. I *thought* I used the Google Play Store to install Chrome to the tablet. (I had looked at the html5test website and it said Chrome had a higher HTML5 rating than the Dolphin/Jetpack browser I've been using on my tablet.)

But something went terribly wrong.

After sending Chrome to it, I unlocked the tablet and used both Chrome and Dolphin to go to html5test website. They both scored the same or nearly the same. I don't know if any of that is relevant, but I'm including it just in case.

At some point after that, I woke the tablet with the power key and used my unlock pattern on the dots lock screen.

That's when I saw what I believe was mal-ware in action. The settings menus were scrolling and sub-menus being selected, all by themselves. I couldn't say exactly what was changed because whatever program or script that was running the process was going extremely fast.

When I realized it might be trying to send out data over my Wifi network, I turned off the Wifi router in my home.

I repeatedly held down the power key to turn the system off, but doing so only rebooted back to the useless lock screen which was not responding to anything. The normal method of holding the power button for a few seconds to bring up the menu and then tapping the "Power Off" option on that menu refused to power off the system. Nothing on that menu responded to touch.

Entering my pattern on the lock screen did absolutely nothing. I didn't even see any lines traced when I ran my finger over the screen.

At some point, I pulled out the external SD card. I have no idea if whatever hacked the tablet also put a copy of itself on the SD card.

I called a friend who looked up how to restore the tablet to factory settings. I didn't understand the directions exactly, so I ended up on a screen with a Warning!! about installing a Custom OS. (Holding down the Power + Volume Up seems to get me there)

I left it on this screen, and I turned my router back on and using my laptop, contacted Live Chat at Samsung but they didn't understand my problem. They told me to reboot the device and swipe my pattern several times and then after several failed attempts I would have the chance to use my Google credentials to get into it. But the device apparently never registered that my swipe attempts were failing.

So my device was booted up with me locked out, with the WiFi router on for a little while again. I turned off the router as soon as I realized that. That disconnected the chat session, but since Samsung chat wasn't helping me anyway, I didn't bother trying to go back.

I got the device back to the "Warning!!" screen. Then turned the router back on and searched for how to do a factory reset of the device. I found a video on YouTube and followed it.

I pressed the Volume Down and Power buttons simultaneously, followed by letting go of the power button. That brought up a menu which contained several options, including an option to do a factory reset. I used the volume buttons to highlight that and pressed Power key. A second screen came up and I used the volume buttons and power button to select "Yes" to confirm the reset.

It appeared to have done a factory reset, rebooting eventually.

However, after that, when I tried to tap on the touch screen to move forward through the selections, the touch screen was still unresponsive!

So I brought back the "Warning!!" screen and ran the battery down until the screen was blank and it wouldn't start when I held the power key.

Then I charged it for about 20 minutes and rebooted it. I think when it came back it was on the Recovery menu. I think I did a second factory reset, but not 100% sure. It eventually rebooted after a lot longer than usual.

When it came up, it was saying battery was low. I tried to tap the OK button, but nothing happened. Behind the battery window was the first setting screen to set up the device for the first time after a factory reset. (I think selecting USA?)

I brought back the "Warning!!" screen and left it on overnight so that the battery would run down.

That was about 8 hours ago. When I woke up, I used clear tape to keep the power button pressed down, to ensure that the battery will continue to run down.

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What do I do next? How do I get the touch screen to start working again? It is not a hardware problem, unless mal-ware can break the hardware. The touchscreen had been working fine until this happened.

Should I take the tablet back to Best Buy where I bought it at least a year (maybe 2 years) ago? I don't know if it's still under warranty.

I have over 20 year of experience as a software developer, but not for Android. I am not very experienced with doing anything to hardware.

Should I try to fix it myself?

I have never rooted any Android device and I'm not sure what that means, either.

I've never re-installed the ______ ? (rom? image? Odin?)

I read on this and/or other forums that there's a way to replace something, but the instructions were beyond my level of understanding. I would need the procedures to be broken down into steps which don't assume too much about what I know.

I understand how to download a file to Windows, given a URL for it. I understand what a zip file is and how to extract it. I understand how to press hardware buttons and plug in cables, and do these steps in the order I'm told.

I don't understand what I'd use to get the downloaded whatever-they-are onto the tablet to replace whatever-the-other-thing-is so that the touchscreen works again.

As far as I know, Odin is a Norse god.

The only firmware updates I've ever done are the ones that the device does on it's own through Samsung's updates.

I'd deeply appreciate getting this device back since I have extremely limited funds and probably won't be able to buy a replacement.

Thank you,

Linda