iPad 2 issues ...

Good morning, I have the ipad 2 and last night before going to bed I plugged my ipad into the usb to charge and sync. About 2 a.m. I was waken up from the sound of the ipad 2 sounding like it was being woke up. The sound was going on about every 2-3 seconds. I unplugged it and the beeping (?) sound stopped, I attempted to wake it up but the screen was black and only a faint circle type wheel going around in the center like something was trying to happen. This morning when I got up I plugged it into the electrical plug to see if it just didn't like the usb ... not so, nothing happens other than when it is plugged in it makes that noise. Any suggestions as to what to do now?

Hold the home and power button until the device resets and see if it starts to behave properly again..

Thanks so much ... that worked. What would have caused that to happen?

Could be a wide variety of things related to the OS or application or something. Generally it's hard (and supposed to be) for the end-user to determine what failed here. If you have Xcode installed on your machine then when you connect the iPad, it will grab some debugging information and allow you to explore that or send it off to Apple for analysis.

I've, generally, found the iOS based devices to be very resilient and only have to hard-reset it in this fashion when some application misbehaves or leaves the OS in some funky state.

The only thing I can thing of (and this is strictly a WAG) is a power surge.