[Acer Iconia A500] gradyzero:
:confused:I find myself being a noob after being a lurker around here for 2 years. This is my first post. I came here to learn and pretty much felt everyone here knew so much more than I did and I really had little to post of value. About a month ago I flashed several of the ROM's and then upgraded the OS on my Windows 6.5 mobile HTC HD2 using the binaries and instructions from the xda Windows forum. Everything went smoothly and it is now running beautifully on Windows 7.5 mobile. Faster than any of my friend’s stock Win 7 phones, I might add. I'm a certified Unix Engineer and pretty much an expert on Linux having written much of the original code for printing when Linus was developing the first version. I now run Linux Mint in an Oracle Virtual box on Windows 7 Ultimate for my SMTP server. I realize this is somewhat of a regression and I apologize for boring you guys with my background but I felt the need to give a bit of personal info before getting into my request for help, so that any adviser would know that I can talk the talk as well as walk the walk. My noob status is because I came here to learn and not post stupid issues and embarrass myself, I constantly see much of that in all the forums. I have searched and read all advice I can find on xda prior to this post and find others who have had the same problem but their resolutions don’t work for me. I am at the point where I had to post. If anyone has any fresh ideas that can help, please speak up. I'm not bricked but I might as well be, I'm stuck on 3.0.1. Here is my problem.

I allowed Acer's OTA 3.2 to update my Icona A500 last Thursday. The table was rooted and I had updated the xpa_supplicant to support ad hoc wifi while on 3.1. I saved that update over to my external SD before accepting the OTA update to Android 3.2 from Acer. I was hoping that Acer had fixed the ad hoc issue but afraid I might have to re-root and reapply the xpa_supplicant after the flash. I stupidly didn't read all the cries for help both on xda and on the Acer sponsored A500 forum prior to taking on the Acer OTA update. Many of the Acer forum post now showing up are from owners who aren't technical, have no idea what rooting is and no idea even that their Android is hosted on Linux but were unhappy with superficial changes the upgrade had done to various parts of the the UI and the effects it was having on some of their apps. My issue was I need ad hoc wifi or my tab is worthless for my business needs if it can tether and travel. Again, I regress and I apologize.

You guys already know the consequences for the OTA 3.2 update from Acer so I won't go into that. I had planned to flash my first ROM this weekend anyway, as I wanted to upgrade to Tabtoony 2.1. But, after realizing that I couldn't root after the OTA 3.2 from Acer, I download the Acer recovery installer and installed thor's CWM recovery v5.0.0.0 rev 1.3.4 and used it to flash the tablet back to Android 3.0.1 via stock 1.141.07_COM_GEN1. 3.0.1 was known to be buggy and won't even keep a wifi connection for longer than 5 minutes so I couldn’t just stay at 3.0.1. So I proceed forward by then following very systematically the directions from drkalo on the xda A500 forum on flashing your first ROM. These are the step that I when through.

1. I download the Tabtoony 2.1 zip via Windows. I ran IZarc test on the zip from Windows to make sure there were no CRC problems in the zip. All files were good and I even unzip it on Windows with no errors or other problems.

2. The tablet was rooted by CWM so I didn’t need to run Gingerbreak or Iconaroot. I connected the tab to Windows via wifi after re-downloading File Manager HD from the market (I like it better than Root Explorer) because it supports network connetion to Window NTFS file system.

3. I copied the upgrade zip using File Manager HD over to my External SD card and to the Internal SD card, still unsure which one it should be on. There are several YouTube video tutorials on Flashing Tabtoony to the A500. In every one, the demonstrator copies the zip to be flashed to the internal SD card but drkalo explicitly says the external SD. I copied it over to both. BTW, my external SDHD is formatted to FAT32 could that be a problem? I know most Linux distributions have built-in support for FAT32 but I realize the core Linux used on the tab is customize and not one of the standard distributions at least as far as I know. So I have no idea what features may or may not have been removed. But the external card was visible and useable in 3.1 after I created a mnt point to it manually.

3. I then booted into recovery mode and CWM came up and I cleared several caches as suggested and I then chose “– choose zip from sdcard”. I immediately got the following of message:

E:Can’t mount /sdcard

I am then returned to the CWM recovery menu

4. I have tried formatting the sdcard from CWM. Although I still don't know which SDcard is being referred to, but I get the following messages:

Formatting /sdcard…

Error mounting /sdcard!

Skipping format….

Done.

Upon rebooting back to 3.0.1 both sdcards still have all their data on them so format truly does fail. So I'm stuck in 3.0.1 and can't get CWM to mount "the" sdcard or format it. So I can’t flash a new customized 3.2. I have gone over drkalo xda post step by step several times to be sure I'm not missing something but the results are always the same. I would be grateful for any advice or new ideas.

Thanks and I apologize for the long post.

Grady