Back to Jelly Bean

While attempting to reinstall an Android 7 ROM (KatKiss) on my tablet, something went kerflooey and the tablet got into a state where it would just stop at the ASUS splash screen during start up. I could get back into recovery mode (TWRP) no problem. Reflashing the KatKiss ROM and OpenGApps seemed to work without any errors, but the boot process just wouldn’t go past the ASUS splash screen.

Finally I decided to see if I could get the stock 4.1.1 ROM back on the tablet.

  • Grab the most recent stock firmware from the ASUS website and extract the blob file out of it.
  • Grab the Kang TWRP recovery image (look for a download link for 3.1.0-1 on page 12 of the thread).
  • Get the tablet into the bootloader (hold the Power+Vol Down down when turning the tablet on).
  • Get into fastboot mode. I had to use the Vol Down button to select the USB icon, then press Vol Up.
  • Confirm the tablet is connected to the computer with fastboot devices -l
  • Flash the stock firmware with fastboot flash system blob
  • Reboot back to the bootloader (fastboot reboot-bootloader) and get back to fastboot mode.
  • Flash the recovery image with fastboot flash recovery twrp-3.1.0-1-tf201t.img
  • Reboot with fastboot reboot

That got my tablet back up and running with Android 4.1.1 (Jelly Bean). However, attempts to get from there back to Android 7.1 (Nougat) with the KatKiss ROM still resulted in getting stuck at the ASUS splash screen.

I guess I’ll leave it with the stock ROM now. A working tablet is better than a non-working tablet. I just use the tablet for reading ebooks these days, and Android 4.1.1 still does that just fine.

Back to Android 4.1.1
Back to Android 4.1.1