[Galaxy Tab 2 Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] amarb:
Greetings xda-developers,

I own a galaxy tab 2 P3100 16GB model since march 2013 (pretty old yeah, but i like it, its my first tab :)) It is running everything stock (recovery plus OS, JB 4.1.2).

It was working all good and serving good for my browsing, whatsapp, mails, youtube, hotstar etc etc. (heavy user of tab) Suddenly on one fine Sunday morning it restarted by itself. I thought this to be normal but it wasn't. After every 10 to 20 seconds I could hear the starting tone. When i looked to the tab, it was pretty warm on the left side where it usually does when used heavily, but it was acting strange.

The tab was restarting by itself! The home screen appears, i could start an app and suddenly it restarts and this continues every 20 seconds until the battery goes low.

I thought two new installed apps would e problem so i removed them and to my surprise(!), they were back again after next 'auto restart'. The 'auto restart' stuff happened back in January this year (after my nephew installed many games on it) but was solved when I did factory reset from settings menu.

But this time nothing successful. Neither factory reset from settings menu nor from recovery. I have tried using twrp and CM11 last year but returned to stock after few months.

I tried flashing twrp, cwm recoveries but after every boot it returns to stock. Even flashing OS didn't helped.

My problem is similar to these:

https://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=2641158

and

https://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=2627490

and

https://xdaforums.com/galaxy-tab-2/help/unable-to-install-twrp-t3696545

Also the stock recovery screen shows the following at bottom:

# Manual Mode #

-- Appling Multi-CSC...

did not match sized '/system/csc/common/system/csc/default_workspace.xml'(No data available)

(I wanted to attach image to this post but could not find an option.)

From all my readings on this forum, I can conclude (?) that its an emmc issue (end of life?).

Need your help guys.

The tab is in excellent condition except this issue. Can this be solved?

I am from electronics and embedded system (microcontrollers) profession and hobbyist. I know replacing emmc or motherboard (or scrapping the tab, NO! i don't want to though i now own the Lenovo tab 4 8 plus 3GB RAM+16GB version :D) is an obvious solution.

A (may be obvious) possibility came in my mind if external memory card could be used for booting and I (and many others) could bring their tab to use (instead of making it a paperweight :confused::()

I though this to be possible solution: https://xdaforums.com/galaxy-tab-2/general/discussion-alternative-tab-2-emmc-bug-t3306862

but i am not able to understand the instructions and the links posted by OP are not functional.

Can this be a solution:

https://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=1866675

OR

I am thinking of this:

I got schematics and service manual for p3100 from internet. I looked the datasheet for OMAP4430. I am thinking whether the boot sequence can be changed (or may be no need to change the sequence) and we can boot from external micro SD card

or something like

https://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=1312391

or can https://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=2109044 be used?

But whenever i plugged my tab in windows without battery or with battery, initially i could see new device found 'OMAP....' something but immediately after 2 or so seconds it shows device unplugged.

Any comments guys?

Thanks for reading patiently the long write up...