Recovering an encrypted Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1

Yesterday my Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 from this years Google I/O received the OTA Android Honeycomb 3.1 update, however as my device was encrypted it did not go so well…

After booting the device I found it would no longer accept my password to log into the device, this password is required to decrypt the data on the device. It appears the update did not preserve the encryption seed or something along those lines. Unfortunately the Samsung people on Twitter were of little help, so I reported it to the guys over at The Inquirer. After some Googling I found a solution, described below.

To recover the device you need to have Fastboot and a recovery image to boot the device into so you can factory reset it. I have packaged these together into single zip, original sources can be found at the end of the post.

fastboot + recovery image download (3.71MB)

To factory reset your device follow these steps:

1. Power off your tablet.
2. Press and hold down the volume down button and then press the power button, while the device powers up keep holding down the volume button till you see the screen below.
   
3. Press the volume down button to select the USB icon to the left and then press the volume up button to confirm your selection.
4. Connect your tablet to your PC via USB.
5. In your command line client enter the directory you extract the fastboot binary and recovery image to.
6. Run “sudo fastboot devices” you should see at least one device listed.
7. Run “sudo fastboot boot recovery.img”, this will boot your device into a recovery console, once booted your device will show the screen below.
8. Select “wipe data/factory reset” and confirm you want to wipe your device.
9. Select “reboot system now”, once your device has rebooted you will have a factory fresh Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 with Android Honeycomb 3.1 on it!

The source of the fastboot binary was found on the xda-developers forum and the source for the recovery image was from Droid Basement (Stock IO Recovery), if you are running Windows you should be able to download the original fastboot zip from xda-developers which contains the Window binary.