Nexus 7 Not Booting; Backlight Turns on while Charging A friend of mine has a Nexus 7 2012. Although it used to work, it now won't turn on. I would mark this off as a broken battery or screen if it were not for this one oddity: the backlight turns on while the device is charging. I am unable to reach the bootloader or recovery mode. He does not know what Android version it runs, so I can be of no help there. He also says that this happened after he let his Nexus turn off due to low battery. Is there any way I would be able to fix this issue (say jumpstart it and use USB debugging to fix it?), or is the device truly broken?
My Nexus ran the battery flat and would not restart, although I did not have the backlight issue that you mention.

There are a number of tricks suggested at:
https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/2668668?hl=en
which involve powering on and pressing volume buttons.  This worked for me and the Nexus now behaves as well as it ever did.