Is my iPad a brick now? (No jailbreak or pirated music)
I have a 16gb white wi-fi only iPad 2 that I bought 3 1/2 years ago brand new from Sam's Club. Earlier tonight it died so I plugged it into the wall to charge, I left it for about 15 minutes, came back and held the power button to turn it on, all it did was pop up the white apple in the center of the screen, which remained there for a long period of time (I'd say about 3-4 minutes) then the screen would shut off. So I remembered that when my iPad would spaz out I would hold the power and home buttons at the same time for a soft-reset, so I did that,the first few times nothing happened, then really fast it flashed the screen with the charge cable on it with the red iTunes bubble above it (This has never happened to me before on my iPad, I've only seen it happen on my sister's iPad when she installed iOS8, so I know this means that iTunes crashed and got wiped off my iPad and needs to be re-installed from a computer). After I finished freaking out (I couldn't remember if my photos were synced to iCloud, since I have THREE YEARS OF PHOTOS ON IT), I plugged it into my computer, opened iTunes and after a minute it ran me through the recovery process, I did and iTunes said it was finished. My iPad did not automatically turn on so I held down the power button, the same thing happened as before, the white apple for around 3 minutes, then black screen, every once in a while seeing the charge cable with the red iTunes bubble. I've tried re-installing iTunes again, but now my computer wont even recognize that my iPad is plugged in (including the iTunes client).
I have done nothing with my iPad that it isn't supposed to do, I have never jailbroken it, I have never put pirated music on it, nothing of the sort, so I am totally enraged at this right now. This was the labor of two years of chores, lawn mowing and leaf raking, $100 of it was a birthday gift from my mom and dad (the other $300 mine), there are a ton of photos on it, I've documented two whole Christmases over the course of the whole month of December on it, if I lose this I'm going to be extremely saddened. Not to mention I got it on my 13th birthday.
The only things I've done wrong with it is one time it fell screen down on my floor, which sent a crack from the top left corner to the bottom right corner (but that was months ago), the other thing I've done wrong is I have't updated it since I installed the first version of iOS8, but until now, nothing has gone wrong.
Please, I'm begging, can anyone tell me anything about this. Has my iPad somehow bricked?
P.S. I'm sorry about posting this in every category, but none of them really fit my situation, so I chose all of them.
iPad 2, iOS 8, 16gb wifi only