[Android Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] dsulliii:
Difficult Hurdle trying to create LiveSuit-Flashable ROM

Ah, kind BLuFeNiX, many "thanks". Yeah, I'm certainly hoping that I do.

This is only my second endeavor (it was supposed to be my first, but I ended up doing the Trio first instead. And am I GLAD that I did!)

I haven't found a solution to my problem yet, so if any of you may feel inspired to point some various directions towards this newbie, I'd certainly appreciate it. Here's the scoop:

1) On my Trio, it was ICS... there was an ICS-flashable ROM ALREADY in existence for a similar machine that also had proper partitioning. I used that ROM as my "donor" and then applied all of the magical mumbo jumbo steps of the kitchen by replacing its contents with the contents from the dumps of my own Trio to turn it into a flashable ROM for the Trio. First one ever, from what I've gathered elsewhere. It was perfect in every sense. I ended up making two; the first for factory-new and the second for properly rooted, CWM, Play Store, and Google Play Services. Thus, this ROM turned it into a tablet that everybody always wants to make out of them anyway.

2) On our Azpen A700s, we have Jelly Bean 2. The only flashable ROM I've ever found for it is the one mentioned way at the beginning of this thread, and it is ICS, not Jelly Bean. On top of that, BLuFeNiX and I discovered that the partitions were wong, so BLuFeNiX somehow magically fixed them to match the A700.

3) Using BLuFeNiX's partition-modified version of the ICS ROM, we can flash the AS700 then restore all of the pre-change NANDx partitions to it allowing us to return it, as well, to factory-new.

4) Following my same steps that I did for the Trio, all seems to go well. I examine the finished ROM in DragonFace, and it gives me the seal of approval (no, not really, no "seal", and no "ok, I approve", just that it says that the ROM is okay.)

5) When I go to flash the partition modified ICS ROM with its new Jelly Bean contents, LiveSuit gives me a "4+some minutes" estimate to flash whereas all of the previous ROMS are barely 2+some minutes... THAT seems weird.

6) The ROM flashes to the A700 just fine! No errors, nothing. Seems perfect as can be.

7) << This is a sidenote: >> After many failures, I decided to add a boot icon because it wasn't present in DragonFace, and when the tablet doesn't work, all I get is a back-illuminated screen. I figured that if I added a boot icon, then I could at least get a clue if it was failing before /bootloader, or between /bootloader and /boot.

8) << See sidenote in #7 above. >> When I start the tablet, it promptly shows my boot icon just as when booting factory ROM shows the little Andy icon at that stage. (Somehow Andy gets lost while converting the ICS ROM to contain my Jelly Bean NAND data.)

9) My boot icon never goes away... it just hangs... forever.

10) I fancy that I think I'm booting into recovery by holding down the volume button while powering on, then releasing volume and power after about 5 seconds. When I do that, I get the exact same result as in #8 and #9 above.

So I suspect that the missing Andy boot icon when viewing the ROM in DragonFace might be some kind of an indicator to the problem, and the ROM-flashing time of nearly double what all the other ROMs are might be as well. But other than those two things, I'm not sure where to look. Additionally, those two things don't tell me ANYTHING because I haven't learned enough about this technology yet to have any clue what it means or how I would go about trying to find some kind of solution for it even if I did have a clue.

Which leads me to a query of those-of-you that are much more knowledgeable in this than am I. No, two queries:

a) Any ideas? or any Suggestions?

b) Where would you recommend that I go looking to try to possibly find a ROM that might flash onto this tablet that ALREADY has Jelly Bean on it? I'm having trouble discovering any with my own Google searches. I'm sure you all already know what I have learned: searching for "a13b ROM" in Google doesn't give you a whole lot of useful or related suggestions. I have tried all of the ROMs in the TechKnow forum's factory ROMs.

I don't mind this being a group project at all, folks. I am just hoping that it turns out as successful as the Trio project did. And I'm still ecstatic about what BLuFeNiX and others have done in THIS topic for the Azpen A700 already. I just want to get it to that flashable ROM stage, eh? And I want to learn to understand it as we go.

Thanks all! And thanks for taking the time to read my novel here... I get wordy sometimes. :o

-- David