FIX: IPad turns on and off in a loop during charging, boots to home screen and reboots

Ok, after having my ipad 2 3rd Generation for about a year, its bombed out on me,playing on it until battery drained. Didn’t think anything of it, plugged into charge thinking it would be charged by the morning. This didn’t happen.


It was stuck on the apple sign, booted to home screen and switched off again due to low battery. Continued on this loop for the whole day……


I searched the internet and it seemed all doom and gloom that I would need to by another one. Then I stumbled upon a forum where the advice so far has worked for me.


The reason why it gets stuck in a loop is because the IPad was not shut down manually, so therefore keeps trying to boot up soon as it has some battery power. Problem is, its gone beyond a point and now and there isn’t enough battery life to boot to main or home screen after apple logo.


The remedy is quiet simple, follow these steps to get the ipad to home screen to power it down so it has sufficient time to charge up and boot normally and get off the endless loop.


  1. Plug into wall socket to get it charging.
  2. Wait until the apple logo appears and wants to boot up.
  3. QUICKLY hold down home button and reset/ sleep button at the same time until it reboots.
  4. Release buttons now. should now power down and reboot
  5. Repeat step 3 at least 30 to 40 times which is about 10 minutes in duration everytime you see the logo appear on the screen.
  6. Now Let IPad boot up fully, should see home screen with about 2% battery life
  7. QUICKLY hit the rest/ sleep button down for about 2 to 5 seconds.
  8. Swipe the screen to when slider appears to switch off the ipad.
  9. This will now power down the IPad which now will not reboot by itself so it can now charge without any interruption’s.
  10. Allow battery to charge for a least an hour or two without trying to put it on.
  11. Switch the IPad on
  12. You should now have about 10 to 20% battery Life
  13. Power it down again by holding the reset/ Sleep button down again and swipe the screen to power down, let it charge fully to 100% now which will take few hours
  14. Enjoy your IPad again 🙂 🙂


Lesson learnt. When your battery power is low, dont wait for it drain completely, rather power the pad down manually and let it charge when there is only about 2 to 4% battery life left.


Hope this guide helps people with the same problem as I had. Took me about 2 days of research and searching until I found a solution that worked. Hopefully this will assist anyone going through the same pain, and possibly not have to buy another one which seems to be the case when people take the pad to an istore with the same issue.


Cheers,

iPad 2, GUIDE TO FIX IPAD ON A LOOP

Posted on Apr 12, 2014 4:59 AM

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Posted on Mar 28, 2015 11:25 AM

WildChild7778, Thank you SO VERY much for posting this!!!! 🙂 I **think** this actually fixed my problem.

I had the exact problem you described. My IPAD 3 was stuck in the endless restarting / looping cycle and would continually re-start and not charge the battery beyond 1%. Then it would shut down and repeat the process before I could do anything. Your solution seems to have worked, I kept doing the cycle you recommended for about 15 minutes. Anyway, if it did not work, I will update and repost, otherwise consider the issue resolved!! I think you are correct about the cause, my iPad was plugged in and playing a video last night, but the combination of the fact that I plugged it in below 5% and the fact the power consumption must have been large, the iPad died without being properly shut down. Somehow, this must have caused the error. I recently updated to the most recent iOS, I wonder if that had anything to do with it.

Anyway, sorry for the rambling message----I cannot thank you enough. You are the best! 🙂🙂

48 replies

Sep 23, 2014 2:06 PM in response to WildChild7778

I had to modify the solution as home screen would never show up and restore mode didn't work.

Whenever I was trying to restore from iTunes (in few times I could put it into the restore mode) iPad would start another reboot loop and iTunes would loose iPad again, terminating restore.


1. I unplugged iPad from computer.

2. iTunes still could see it, so I unchecked wi-fi sync as well. (I'm not sure if this is necessary)

3. I did steps 2 and 3 as WildChild7778 did, that is to say I held down home button and reset/ sleep button at the same time, immediately after each time Apple logo showed up.

4. After 6-7 times iPad stopped the continuous boot up loop and the apple logo got stuck up on the screen forever.

5. This allowed me to do a restore from iTunes. I plugged it to computer again and started restore, this time it went uninterupted.

6. I backed up from an old backup.

This made me loose data I had since the last backup, but I got my iPad back...

(I got into this situation when I was trying to do too many updates at the same time. Do them one at a time.)

May 4, 2015 10:04 PM in response to PrabuBLR

This has also happened to me iPad except it belong to my autistic seven year old daughter! You have to redo the reset process as lined out by wild child , it does work but it takes forever . I would keep thinking it hasn't worked and try to get it to load in losing all charge again. Once I reset ( apple logo hit home button at he same time as off switch hold down for ten seconds ) I did that over and over for almost 40 minutes and finally got enough charge and switched it off. That was three days ago and now it is fine. The full instructions wild child gave are above but they do work , it just takes patience .

Jul 15, 2015 6:58 PM in response to Alexis.B

Alexis.B's simpler process worked perfectly for my iPhone 6+. I ran low of patience after 2 minutes of charging and powered it up. It had enough juice to become self aware again. Thanks for the save


Ok so there is a much easier solution to this problem. I used my iPad until the battery was completely flat, then when I went to charge it, it got stuck in the never ending reboot loop.


So here's what you need to do to fix this problem.


1. Plug in the charger

2. When the Apple logo appears, unplug the charger

3. As soon as you see the home screen appear, plug the charger back in. You need to do this quickly as the home screen only shows for a split second

4. The loading wheel should appear and shut down the iPad

5. Leave the iPad for a good 30mins or so just to get some battery life into before you start using it again.

Aug 24, 2015 8:13 PM in response to rakobernik

rakobernik wrote:


Alexis.B's simpler process worked perfectly for my iPhone 6+. I ran low of patience after 2 minutes of charging and powered it up. It had enough juice to become self aware again. Thanks for the save


Ok so there is a much easier solution to this problem. I used my iPad until the battery was completely flat, then when I went to charge it, it got stuck in the never ending reboot loop.


So here's what you need to do to fix this problem.


1. Plug in the charger

2. When the Apple logo appears, unplug the charger

3. As soon as you see the home screen appear, plug the charger back in. You need to do this quickly as the home screen only shows for a split second

4. The loading wheel should appear and shut down the iPad

5. Leave the iPad for a good 30mins or so just to get some battery life into before you start using it again.

This worked for me as well. I started trying the previous solution from Wildchild for way longer than i had patience for. ;-)

Nov 10, 2015 5:30 PM in response to WildChild7778

This post is old but recently my daughter's iPad started having a problem like this one and so I found this thread while looking for solutions. I have tried WildChild7778 procedure but to no avail. Even connecting to the laptop to restore from iTunes resulted to nothing, basically because there is no power to the iPad. I reckon the battery is so flat it has no power left. Curiously though, when plugged to a wall outlet , the iPad will exhibit the "loop" as described by WildChild7778 - which is Black Screen...Empty Battery.... Apple Logo....Black Screen.

What I did, and I was able to replicate this, is:

1. PLUG INTO WALL OUTLET, WAIT until the empty battery shows up, then at the first instant the APPLE LOGO shows, PRESS the POWER BUTTON alone and don't let go.

2. NOTICE that the apple logo won't go away now that you are pressing the POWER BUTTON.

3. press now the HOME BUTTON (WHILE STILL pressing the Power button). keep pressing both for 5-10 seconds and try to let go if the Apple logo will stay. If it stays, then,

4. your iPad is now BOOTING UP. (there is a point where the screen has gone black again while booting but after a minute or so, it opened in its home screen.)


With my daughter's iPad, with the screen alive, I learned that IT WAS NOT CHARGING and it still has about 30% battery. She said it turned off while she was using it. Since it was not charging, I unplug the charger, the iPad went dead again. I repeated the procedure above and was successful. this time the iPad went charging.


IT IS NOW FIXED. I hope this helps.

Mar 1, 2016 7:51 AM in response to _Simon

Just wanted to confirm the success of trying the freezer method. I tried the other suggestions with no success (however the lack of success might have to do with my Home Button not working all the time), so I moved on to this. And it worked great. Circumstances made it so that once I removed the ipad from the freezer and plugged it in, it sat unattended for almost 24 hours. So when I came back to it, it was fully charged to 100%.

Sep 15, 2016 12:15 PM in response to camatis2

Thank you! THANK YOU to both WildChild 7778 and camatis2. I first followed the instructions from WildChild7778 and made enough progress that I was able to connect to my itunes and download the latest version but then it went back to the battery / apple icon / battery loop! Next I unplugged it from my computer and back into the wall outlet and followed camatis2's instructions; it actually worked after the 3rd attempt!! Started up with 2% battery life and after about 5 minutes, it is now up to 6% and working just fine while it is charging!

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FIX: IPad turns on and off in a loop during charging, boots to home screen and reboots

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