Recently I bought this android tablet really look forward to the power and mobility it gave, and I was so surprised. It didn’t just fill me with joy using it, I use it pretty much everyday and what excitement I get from using it. I currently have the 32GB model, quite a large jump from the 16GB one at quite a price – but well worth it.

So I wouldn’t be myself if I didn’t try to root the thing. Luckily the tablet came with a version of Gingerbread on it, and luckily with a little bit of hunting I was able to find a modified apk that would allow me to gain full root access.

The modified apk you are looking to get is called GingerBreak and it is a relatively easy and painless process to getting things moving.

You will first need to download GingerBreak and move it to the SD card in your tablet.

Next ensure that USB debugging is on and that install from unknown sources is ticked.

Open your favored file explorer app on your tablet and locate the apk file

Execute the apk file to allow it to install to your device

Now run the GingerBreak app, and allow it to run the root procedure.

As long as there have been no problems you should now happily be the proud owner of a rooted Acer Iconia A500

Disclaimer: I take no responsibilty for anything you may have caused to yourself or your hardware. This is written as an advice or a guide. Every situation is different and you follow these steps at your own risk***

Usually you aren’t required to even think about the eMMC chip, what it does or what consequences a specific action has on it until you break it.

This is when things go wrong:

E:Can't mount /cache/recovery/command
E:Can't mount /cache/recovery/log
E:Can't open /cache/recovery/log
E:Can't mount /cache/recovery/last_log
E:Can't open /cache/recovery/last_log

Now luckily I’ve only ever had one failure of a chip and that was with a G1 which basically couldn’t take any of the re-building any more and just gave up. What I will say is that before you go jumping into anything regarding replacing the chip, or following another persons advice I would seriously read up on all that you can that is online. There are thousands of postings on the internet where people have had problems and been able to resolve them without having to take the phone apart and replace the chip.

Plenty of people have experienced what you are experiencing so the best port of call is to find a nice friendly forum (kind of hard to find now-a-days) and make a post detailing all of the issues.

Now what to do when you are posting all the information regarding the phone you have, model, age, firmware version. If you have adb set up on your computer – which I would expect you to have if you were flashing roms, what to do would be to enter into recovery mode, plug the phone into the PC, and open up a command prompt on the pc. Now you want to connect via adb to the device and once connected run


dmesg | grep mmc0


Now if the output contains this message:


mmc0: failed to get card ready
mmc0: reinit card
mmc0: Starting deferred resume
mmc0: Deferred resume failed


Then I’m afraid there isn’t much that can be done, if that set of messages rolls into your command window you are basically looking at getting a replacement chip. There are unfortunately no work a rounds to save you from this, no other solutions at all. Basically new phone or new chip – the choice is yours.

For the people that didn’t get that message, remember to post the output in your forum post and you may be able to save your lovely handset.