Even before I went on vacation this year, my (second) cheap Chinese tablet was broken. It somehow got itself into an endless boot loop where it would hang at one of two logos during boot (the fullscreen image or the animated Android word logo). To be honest, I wasn’t actually using that tablet much except to play my alt Happy Street account so it wasn’t actually a big loss that I couldn’t get it to work – it just irritates me that it somehow broke.

I’ve been trying to fix it on and off for awhile now; again, not too seriously because I don’t actually need to use it. But when I did try it, I wasn’t getting much success. I knew that I had exactly the Eken T10A tablet, and although it is relatively popular, there weren’t a lot of posts on how to solve my problem. I finally solved my problem this past week, and factory reset the tablet. Here’s how I did it:

1. Download the AllWinner A10 drivers (link from this post)
2. Download Livesuit (link from this post)
3. Download firmware for the Eken T10A – I used this one, which I think is for the T10 but it seemed to load fine. But I didn’t do a full test of the device to see whether it provided all the necessary drivers.
4. Use a Win7 or earlier computer so you can load the unsigned drivers for the device
5. Follow these instructions to flash the firmware using Livesuit (especially the one where you have to press the power button once ever second until the dialog box pops up)

After this headache, I’m kind of through with cheap Chinese devices. I couldn’t even find a recovery image for this Eken T10A! Nexus-level devices are now pretty cheap and there are many more hackers using those (and thus better support) so I’m just going to get those when I have techlust.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: android, chinese, troubleshooting