[Nexus 7 Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] violoncellemuse:
Okay, so I feel like I've looked everywhere and tried everything for this problem with my Nexus 7. The closest thing I found was this:

(Google: Nexus 7 2012 rebooting reverts back to previous state)(I can't post outside links as I am a new member)

and there was no followup reply, and the thread was closed.

Here's my problem (I want to be very detailed in case I missed something):

I've had Cyanogenmod 11 on my Nexus 7 for a long time (I think I started with M1 release). I recently installed the M7 release after previous nightly and it was working so smooth that I had finally decided there was no need to install nighties anymore. Everything was going fine until the night after when I noticed it kept rebooting, so I reverted it back to the nightly I had before (June 11th?) because I assumed it was probably something bad with the update. Except it did the same thing, rebooting after a couple minutes, which is weird because it never did that with this nightly. There was never enough time to download the nightlies before it reboots so I tried downloading them on my laptop and then just transferring them to my nexus via usb. I put it in the cmupdate folder so that I could quickly go to settings and press install (as it can see the update from there). It rebooted to install, but it went into cwm with what appears that nothing happened, and I usually never see cwm when updating this way. So I figured, while I'm here, I could just "install zip" and find that zip I just transferred and install, right? Nope. The zip mysteriously vanished, yet the other two updates were still there (M7 and the previous nightly). So I just rebooted just to try the process again, maybe the file transfer didn't work. Same thing happened. So I went to cwm and tried wiping cache, nothing. Wiped dalvik cache, nothing. So I went and did it, wiped data/factory reset, that did NOTHING, as in I rebooted and everything was still there.

So I got to the point where I just wanted to see if I could just revert back to stock so I have a place to start from, maybe contemplate on just staying there for a while where there shouldn't be problems. So I got that all set up with fastboot, got the latest 4.4.3 image, unarchived until I could get to the flashall.bat I ran that and it was successful. Okay now I can just boot into that, right? Suddenly I see the cyanogenmod boot graphic. What happened? Even all of my apps are still there. Still freezing and rebooting.

I tried reverting to stock manually by erasing then formating everything that I can, flashed bootloader (grouper 4.23), flashed zip, locked bootloader, unlocked bootloader (trying to erase as much as I can). This did nothing, still cyanogenmod. I tried a third time while rebooting to bootloader with each step. Nothing. I tried doing a factory reset within cyanogenmod, but when I press the "erase everything" button it doesn't lead anywhere, so I could never get that to start the process. I also tried doing the erasing and formatting from cwm (which isn't being overwritten, as it seems, by all the attempts at flashing stock?), nothing.

I was curious. I uninstalled Netflix because it was right there in my dock. Then I rebooted myself. When it came back up, Netflix was still there. I tried various things, also going back to locking the bootloader and rebooting the bootloader, it still said it was unlocked. So I came to the conclusion that literally nothing was being written or committed to the sdcard no matter what I do.

I did some more research and found that article up top. So I tried uninstalling some apps because it said it may have something to do with a third-party app misbehaving (seems a bit extreme, I'll do it anyways), but there's never enough time to erase everything before it reboots. It also said to try to get it into safemode. I think I might have gotten there once but it still rebooted (which makes me think that it didn't get to safemode), the rest of the times it wouldn't even get to the lockscreen.

What I'm currently attempting is to see if I can get it into safemode, or I'm trying to uninstall or stop/clear data for every single app with an intentional reboot each time.

Anyone got any idea what's going on? Is it maybe a bad sector, or worse, bad sdcard?