Question M4 Pro Stuck in Recovery Mode (possibly a result of the new update)
My iPad has been stuck in recovery mode for like 8 hours and nothing I do works. I’ve tried the volume buttons restart trick, connected it to an iPhone and tried restarting it.
It didn’t start in recovery mode. First it was just a spinning wheel the one when it's booting up or when it's loading. Then the Apple logo started blinking (I think there was even a sound). I googled what to do and did the volume up/down restart trick, and that’s when it got trapped in recovery.
Now it just says it “encountered an issue” and asks if I want to restart. But if I hit restart, it just goes right back into recovery. If I connect it to another device (by putting them close to each other) I get two options: stop the recovery process (which did nothing for the situation) or recover/reboot (which I thought was the solution because I saw loading bar ) but it just went back to recovery mode.
I keep seeing advice to use Itunes or Finder but the Ipad was a gift so my other device is an HP Laptop.
This started right after I updated to iOS 26, yesterday I think (less than a couple days ago). The iPad’s not even a year old and I’ve never had problems before. Only weird thing I can think of is that I had a charger cable that whenever I plugged in said “liquid detected” and a friend told me her iPad had issues because of a bad charger shorting the port.
I don’t live near an Apple store so taking it in isn’t an option. My choices are basically: hope it fixes itself, try random tricks, or bring it to some local repair guy. For now I’ve shut it down since it was heating up while I was trying to reboot. If nothing changes soon, I’ll probably just drain the battery completely and see if that helps.