If you have an iPad 2 and Apple’s less than perfect latest version of iOS 9 has bricked it, in my experience, here’s what you can forget about trying.

1. Hard reset. It does not work. Even if you try it several times, it does not work.
2. Charging it. It does not work.
3. dfu mode and recovery via iTunes. It does not work and will present you with various issues while demonstrating to you in a long drawn out waste of time that it does not work.

The only thing that worked in terms of getting the iPad to actually respond to input is restoring the device to factory settings. Before you do that, however, you have to do the following.

1. Go to icloud.com and delete the device from Find My iPad.
2. It is worth updating iTunes to the very latest version. Do not do this via “Check for Updates” because if you’re 12.1.2, iTunes will tell you you are fully up to date which, given that the very latest version today was 12.1.3 is not really accurate.
3. Even if you don’t do (2), you can do the factory settings rebuild and configure the iPad as a new one but if you want to restore from a back up via iTunes, if you are on 12.1.2, iTunes will tell you that the version of iTunes is too old for the iPad and that you need to go to itunes.com and get the latest version. I did not have a back up on iCloud.

   If you do not want to do this, your next choice is to build the iPad from brand new.

4. Wait out the restore (in my case it’s currently estimating about an hour).

If I had known this on Sunday, I would not have upgraded the OS on the device in the first place, but having been stupid enough, I would on every occasion in the future now go for a factory reset. Not one of the provided solutions worked to deal with this and according to Apple, the problem had been fixed in the latest release of iOS9 anyway. Since I had the problem as recently as Sunday, I’m unconvinced.

I’m not happy.