I recently went on a trip and decided that I would leave my Macbook Air at home and instead, take my iPad with me. I figured that I could do pretty much what I needed to do on my iPad, which is mainly correspond with clients, edit PDF and Word documents and email files. I’ve done these types of tasks often enough on the iPad at home so figured that there would be little difficulty doing the same on the road.

Boy, was I wrong!

The first day of the trip I had no problems at all. At the end of the day, I was able to successfully edit a few PDFs and send them back to my clients. It was during the second day that I ran into difficulties. Now at this point, it might be relevant to point out that I took this trip on my motorcycle as this could have something to do with the trouble I encountered.

So the evening of the second day of my trip, I pulled out my iPad ready to catch up on some work. When I tapped the Home button, I encountered the following error:

iPad is Disabled. Connect to iTunes.

Huh? This was the first time I had ever encountered this error. I tried resetting the iPad. I tried rebooting the iPad. I tried screaming at the iPad. No luck – the error message was there to say.

Using my iPhone, I did a Web search for this problem and discovered that if you enable the Password Lock feature and then subsequently make 10 bad password attempts, the iPad will completely disable itself and the only way to reenable it is to connect it to iTunes. There was one problem with this: my Macbook Air was at home. How in the #$%^@ was I supposed to connect it to iTunes?

So what could have happened to cause my iPad to disable itself? The device was with me the entire time and I certainly made no bad password attempts. The only thing that I can figure was that while I was riding on my motorcycle or walking around with the iPad in my backpack, the login screen somehow became activated and the bumpy ride or walk caused the fabric of the backpack to press repeatedly against the login screen. It’s the only thing that makes sense given that nobody else had access to the device.

So where did this leave me? Trying to edit documents and correspond with clients using my iPhone. Not at all an easy task at all, I assure you (definitely looking forward to that 5.5” iPhone that is rumored to be out in the fall!).

Once I got home, I connected the iPad to my computer, launched iTunes and then entered the password on the iPad screen when prompted. Everything was back to normal. Whew!

Once I was able to once again access my iPad, the first thing I did was to disable the passcode lock! I wanted to make sure that this never happened to me again. It’s rare that the iPad leaves my side when I’m out of the house and if by some chance it was stolen, I could use the Find my iPad feature to quickly erase its contents.

If you carry your iPad and there are instances when the device might be jostled about, you might want to consider turning off the Passcode Lock feature (Settings > Security)…otherwise, you might find yourself with a bricked iPad.

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