[TouchPad Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] ohsnapitsme:
How I fixed mine.

Just made an account to post this if anyone else ever happens to come across this thread.

At first pressing any button combination did nothing. I got the already broken TouchPad from a friend (where he got it from idk) and had no idea what had been done to mess it up, whether it was hardware/software or whatever.

First I tried to turn it on, nothing. So I plugged it in and forgot about it for around 2 days thinking the battery might be dead. I had the stock HP cable but used an iPad brick to plug it in the wall.

After 2 days I held power+home and got the little home button led to flash left and right, but nothing else. Somehow through a series of button holds/presses (power+home, power+down/up+home, etc.) I got the battery with question mark symbol to come up.

Tried holding power+home then power+vol.up again but it wouldn’t go into USB symbol mode

Searched and found jcsullins’ TPDebrick v004 (http://rootzwiki.com/topic/38786-tpdebrick-v004/). I have a Mac but was able to install Linux using Parallels.

Got the “all done” from the debrick program, plugged the TouchPad back into the wall for about a day. Held power+home again, now it didn’t show the battery question mark, but would freeze at the HP logo. Still no luck getting into usb mode and all that would work is power+home to turn it off and on, but nothing I tried would get it through the logo.

Thought maybe I used the wrong storage size in the debrick program (since I had no idea if it was a 16, 32, or 64gb) so I did the 32 instead of 16. Still no luck. Tried 16 again, froze on the logo again. I held home+power to turn it off, then plugged the TouchPad into the wall and it started bootlooping (not frozen) at the HP logo. Okay, that’s at least a difference, but still no usb symbol..

The power+vol.up combo wouldn’t do anything at all, power+home would just turn it off where nothing would work until I did the same combo again and it went back to looping. During one loop I just held down the vol.down button, the thing went off, then I did power+home got it back to looping, then held just the vol.up during one of the loop resets and VOILA! White USB symbol appears and I’m now in recovery mode.

Now I could finally follow this thread (http://forums.webosnation.com/hp-touchpad/320485-how-completely-fix-bricked-touch-pad.html). But had to now install Windows on Parallels (probably could have used Linux but it scares me) to follow the procedure.

But of course Windows couldn’t recognize the TouchPad since I didn’t have novaterm and novacom and the hp drivers etc. I had no idea what any of these programs were so it took a while but I found this thread (http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?p=20989526#post20989526), got novacom/novaterm, the recovery image, and webOS Doctor 3.00 and 3.04. Followed the instructions there to install the programs, but whenever I tried typing in novacom in terminal I would get “novacom is not recognized as an internal or external command..” Ugh.

This thread (http://rootzwiki.com/topic/6597-installation-help/) said I needed to put acmeinstaller in the same folder as the novacom.exe file in the Palm, Inc folder. So many threads I went to would never have the files I needed or lead to broken websites because of HP discontinuing support, but I was able to get acmeinstaller from here (http://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/Install_CM_for_tenderloin) and put it in the Palm, Inc folder. Also found all the webOS doctors here (https://web.archive.org/web/2014021...nals.org/wiki/Webos_Doctor_Versions#Wifi_Only). Terminal still wouldn’t recognize novacom…

So I uninstalled it completely, rebooted, then found this thread (http://forums.webosnation.com/canuck-coding/274461-webos-quick-install-v4-6-0-a.html) and used the WebOS Quick Install tool to get novacom installed and that finally worked. I knew it worked because I checked it with the method here (http://www.reverendkyle.com/index.php/articles/91-problems-with-novacom).

That whole time the TouchPad was still on the recovery mode USB symbol and I was just praying it wouldn’t run out of battery or something while I had to do all that extra searching. So I finally met all the requirements, and was able to successfully complete the process again at this thread (http://forums.webosnation.com/hp-touchpad/320485-how-completely-fix-bricked-touch-pad.html). Followed everything to the dot, copying and pasting lines so I wouldn’t screw up, then the TouchPad rebooted (took a looong time to get passed the pulsing logo though) and sent me to the language selection screen holy crap something actually worked.

Went through the beginning of the setup stuff, but OF COURSE I couldn’t finish setup because HP servers were down, so I couldn’t login or even make a WebOS account. FML.

So I searched and searched and found this thread (http://forums.webosnation.com/hp-touchpad/317164-activation-bypass-touchpad.html) that told me how to bypass the activation. The link in this thread (http://forums.webosnation.com/webos...7-bypass-activation-download-link-broken.html) let me download the tool since the one in the above website was down.

Once I did that the TouchPad rebooted, froze on the HP logo for about 10 minutes, then stayed on the pulsing logo for around 15-20 minutes, then booted to a frozen, inoperable webOS… :(

Found this thread about jcsullins’ TouchPad toolbox (http://liliputing.com/2014/06/use-touchpad-toolbox-install-android-erase-webos-hp-touchpad.html) So I held power+home, as soon as it started to reboot held power+vol.up and got into recovery mode. Downloaded the toolbox, followed the instructions in the above thread, and was FINALLY able to get it 100% working and on android!

The whole process took me about a week and a day of trial and error since I had no idea what I was doing on 90% of the steps. Everywhere I went people seemed to be saying that the TouchPad was unbrickable and I found it hard to believe, but after going through everything I did to finally get it working it could be true. I feel like I hit every roadblock possible, but at least it paid off in the end. If it wasn’t for all the random advice and success stories I found on various forums I would’ve never been able to do it, so here’s mine hoping it’ll help you! Good luck!!