Topic: Gamepad unresponsive for 5-10 min

Hello. My Wii U just started doing something weird. I can turn it on but the Gamepad is completely unresponsive for about 5-10min. The only thing you can do during this time is power it back off. Nothing else works. After that 5-10min, you can play for hours with no issues. I’ve tried cleaning the screen with a toothbrush, resetting analog sticks, erasing the Wii U, repairing to the console with no luck. There’s no error message or anything. It just stays stuck on whatever screen you start up in. Anyone have any ideas?

I have a similar issue with a second hand Wii U I recently bought for a friend. The gamepad is unresponsive when turning it on. I'm gonna ask to leave it on for 5-10 mins see if it ends up working, like in your case. But I saw on Google a procedure to boot up the console in a dev mode (by keeping the b button pressed during startup - or something like that) and from there you can delete like the latest installed plugins and hopefully that could fix it. That's something I'll try next time I'm over there.
This happened to my friend after booting up the Yoshi game for the first time, which installed an update. Next time it was turned on, the gamepad is just frozen/doesn't react (except possibly for switching screens).

Hope that can maybe help you.

Interesting. I will have to try to look up that procedure and see if it works. Yeah, its a weird issue because after I let the Gamepad sit, it start working as normal. I’ve been turning it on, go do a couple things then come back and play. Not a huge deal, but without a doubt annoying.

Contact Nintendo and set up a repair. You can contact them various ways, phone, email etc.