Still boot-looping. Tried re-rooting with the NRT thingy, which appeared to go ok: auto rebooted into 'fastboot' mode several times, flashing stuff apparently successfully judging by the log, up until the 'final' reboot ("Waiting for your device..."), then the boot-loop persisting through several restarts.

Not really any viable options for installing linux AFAICT  :-(

Assuming it is not a go with the rooting, my final option is to reflash stock rom and hope it can boot up from that, which it had previously after unlocking, albeit with some difficulty.

Some folks swear by downgrading to Android 4.4, so I guess that's an option too.

The saga continues... after reviewing the NRT rooting [attempt] log (attached ^^^) I suspected that although the SuperSU, BusyBox etc were copied to the tablet, they may not have been installed because of the failed reboot. So I booted into the "TWRP" (replacement recovery partition) and was able to install them from there. But this didn't fix the boot loop. After several attempts, I decided to revert to stock 5.1.1 ROM from TWRP recovery.

In doing this, it reformatted the cache partition (to ext4), I'm not sure if that is normally done from the stock recovery option, since that gives no verbose console indication of WTF is going on, unlike TWRP. TWRP is definitely the superior tool (allowing unhindered access to the file system, including system folders, and mounting all partitions including OTG devices), and a host of recovery options,and I'll be curious to see if that is still on board.

Anyhow, it immediately rebooted into stock Android 5.1.1 which I again have to set up. But at least the tablet is usable. Supposedly the fstrim command can be run from the TWRP console, in which case rooting would not really be needed

My nexus 2013 tablet has died down. It was such a wonderful tablet of that time. Very snappy and was easy to use. 

Are you sure it's dead? I thought mine is/was, but reflashing (three times) brought it back up to scratch.

Attempted rooting* with SuperSU (twice, 2nd time by accident) made it unbootable, so I reflashed stock, configured, flashed TWRP to recovery and backed it all up so (hopefully) future recovery will take a few minutes vs. a few hours.




*now reckoned to be not terribly useful for most folks

Heh, I've got a Nexus 10 and yeah....it's pretty much a paperweight now. Shame really, cos it really did the trick for a long time - but I tried to resurrect it a year or so ago and it would just randomly reboot.

My 7 is back in action. Reflashing with stock rom brought it back from the dead, and I've put in an updated "RAM cleaner" app that somewhat improves usability (still reliably slows down and randomly reboots, but a lot less frequently).

Two main ongoing (apparently related) glitches seem to be wifi and "system ui", which typically crashes about ~15-mins after starting anything using wifi. If it makes it through a system ui reset without rebooting itself, it actually runs smooth for a few hours. So usable about as much as I need it to be.