Rooting the A110?

[jlindy]

I guess the A110 is new enough that there isn't much here yet eh. Well I just bought one as a Christmas present to myself. It was just about a dead heat between the A110 and the Google Nexus 7, but when I spotted an A110 on a web site named after a South American river for $50 less than the Nexus I pulled the trigger, and bam! I should have my Acer on Fri. or Sat. As the Acer is a relative newcomer there's very little information, or how-to's on rooting that bad boy. How about it guys, are there any A110 owner out there that have their tab rooted? What procedure did you use?

 

[Tom T]

You are a rebal, with the Nexus you get a HUGE user base with the guarantee of the latest version of Android before anyone else gets a hint of a possible upgrade. On the other hand, information you gather, and experience you gain will be quite valuable to those that choose the less travelled path. Not meant to be criticism, I am one of the 'lucky' few who invested in the Sony Tablet P.

Sent from my Galaxy Note 10.1

 

[jlindy]

with the Nexus you get a HUGE user base

That's the one thing that made me a bit hesitant with the Acer at first, but then I found one for $50 less than the Nexus and the budget sheet took over along with HDMI plug, and SD card slot . Maybe things will pick up for the A110 after Christmas.

 

[Tom T]

The sd card alone would push me to purchase it over the Nexus. I have a Kindle Fire, a gift last Christmas, and aside from its obvious other shortcomings the lack of external sd is its biggest flaw.

Sent from my Galaxy Note 10.1

 

[CapeNick]

I love my A110, but until someone comes up with a root method, the external sd is damn near useless for anything other then media as you can't move apps to it. Combine this with the limited storage or 8GB (not that you actually get 8GB) and you can run into problems real soon if you're an app whore like myself. That's my only beef with it though, otherwise I couldn't be happier, I went to Staples dead set on getting a Nexus 7, then found this for $200CDN, saw that it had hdmi out and sd slot and was sold. The screen isn't as nice as the Nexus, but I mean it's a 7" tablet, I don't need it to have a supurb quality screen, and it outputs 720p through the hdmi out.

Bottom line is I have no remorse what so ever, I love this tablet, and think I would be extremely disappointed had I gotten the Nexus 7 instead of this. Now someone figure out a rooting method and I'll be as happy as a porcine in feces.

 

[jlindy]

Bottom line is I have no remorse what so ever, I love this tablet, and think I would be extremely disappointed had I gotten the Nexus 7 instead of this. Now someone figure out a rooting method and I'll be as happy as a porcine in feces.

I too love my A110. As for rooting... I'm working on it slow but sure, I may end up with an expensive brick dere eh, but it's gotta be done. I do have the ADB setup. Here's the procedure if you want it.
1). On your tab go into settings/Developer options, and turn them on, and select USB debugging.
2). Go to the Acer website, in the support section under drivers download the USB driver to your PC.
3). Unzip the USB driver and place it in C:\ (I put mine in C:\Acer)
4). Plug your tab into your PC via USB and turn it on.
5). On your PC open Device Manager (Start\Admin. Tools\Computer Management\Device Manager). Under Portable Devices you should see A110 tagged with the yellow meatball of doom. Right click on A110 and select Properties, select the driver tab and click on update driver, select Browse my computer for driver software, and nav. to where you put your driver, and click okay. The driver should install and you should be ready to rock with the ADB.

Next is the hard (and scary) part of actually rooting it, so I'm off to find the Android SDK, and then do some homework on it.

 

[akinandroid]

OK, so i bought this from a UK online retailer back in October. They had exclusivity for a month before the global release (and annoyingly i paid £179 when the day after Acer began offering a £50 cashback which they would not extend to me despite my pleas. When i bought it, the product did not even show on any Acer international website and was if it did not yet exist!

I also chose this over N7 because of SD expandability and HDMI out and share the same opinions as you chaps. Screen, speed of updates, general form factor are all better on N7 but its these hardware features that made the difference. The Acer is a little 'cheap and nasty' but i would expect higher quality/power 7 inch Android slates to show themselves next year in wake of iPad mini introduction.

Anyhoo, as a long time rooter/hacker the biggest frustration i had was a complete lack of any hacking resource for this device. Its been a frustrating few months for me, only slightly lessened by two releases of firmware updates from the manufacturer!

In the past week or so, my daily search for a Root has started turning up threads like this (naturally as time passes) but it would seem as there is not much more than initial discussion at this stage. I am an enthusiast, not a developer so there is little i can do to help and greatly appreciate the efforts of jlindy and others in taking the risk to trailblaze.

I will keep a keen eye on this thread! If anyone can point me to any resources for rooting etc on this device i would be grateful. Ultimately we all want the ability to load a custom ROM at some point!

Cheers

 

[jlindy]

I am an enthusiast, not a developer so there is little i can do to help and greatly appreciate the efforts of jlindy and others in taking the risk to trailblaze.

I too am no developer, just a hobbyist hacking my way along!

I will keep a keen eye on this thread! If anyone can point me to any resources for rooting etc on this device i would be grateful. Ultimately we all want the ability to load a custom ROM at some point!

Cheers

In keeping an eye on this thread if you spot anything that I'm doing that isn't all it could be don't hesatate to tell me I'm screwin' the pooch! Here's a link to the Android SDK:
Android SDK | Android Developers

 

[CapeNick]

I though I would share this with you, Acer A110 - Rooting Tool - Android Forums, the comments aren't too pleasing, I haven't tried as it doesn't seem like anyone's had any success yet, and I have no experience with rooting and am simply not willing to put that much risk into this. But there is the link anyway, hope it helps.

 

[jlindy]

I though I would share this with you, Acer A110 - Rooting Tool - Android Forums,

I've had a near success with that... The hang up with it, and I assume it's the same for the other tools as well, is mounting /system -rw so su can be pushed. I've spent a few hours at the cli trying everything I know to get /system mounted but no soap. They probably have some super secret squirrel /dev/block so it can't be mounted... At least not easily.
Here's the output from cat /proc/mounts in case somebody can see something I'm missing.

shell@android:/ $ cat /proc/mounts
cat /proc/mounts
rootfs / rootfs ro,relatime 0 0
tmpfs /dev tmpfs rw,nosuid,relatime,mode=755 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts rw,relatime,mode=600 0 0
proc /proc proc rw,relatime 0 0
sysfs /sys sysfs rw,relatime 0 0
debugfs /sys/kernel/debug debugfs rw,relatime 0 0
none /acct cgroup rw,relatime,cpuacct 0 0
tmpfs /mnt/asec tmpfs rw,relatime,mode=755,gid=1000 0 0
tmpfs /mnt/obb tmpfs rw,relatime,mode=755,gid=1000 0 0
none /dev/cpuctl cgroup rw,relatime,cpu 0 0
tmpfs /mnt/tss tmpfs rw,relatime,size=1024k,mode=774,uid=1000,gid=1000 0 0
/dev/block/platform/sdhci-tegra.3/by-name/APP /system ext4 ro,relatime,user_xatt
r,acl,barrier=1,data=ordered 0 0
/dev/block/platform/sdhci-tegra.3/by-name/CAC /cache ext4 rw,nosuid,nodev,noatim
e,errors=panic,user_xattr,acl,barrier=1,journal_async_commit,nodelalloc,data=wri
teback 0 0
/dev/block/platform/sdhci-tegra.3/by-name/UDA /data ext4 rw,nosuid,nodev,noatime
,errors=panic,user_xattr,acl,barrier=1,journal_async_commit,nodelalloc,data=writ
eback 0 0
/dev/fuse /storage/sdcard0 fuse rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,user_id=1023,group_id=1
023,default_permissions,allow_other 0 0
/dev/fuse /mnt/tssp fuse rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,user_id=1023,group_id=1023,def
ault_permissions,allow_other 0 0
/dev/block/dm-0 /mnt/asec/air.ClearVision17plus-1 ext4 ro,dirsync,nosuid,nodev,n
oatime,user_xattr,acl,barrier=1 0 0
/dev/block/dm-1 /mnt/asec/com.accuweather.paid.android-1 ext4 ro,dirsync,nosuid,
nodev,noatime,user_xattr,acl,barrier=1 0 0
/dev/block/dm-2 /mnt/asec/com.harryhao.apps.kitchentimerfull-1 ext4 ro,dirsync,n
osuid,nodev,noatime,user_xattr,acl,barrier=1 0 0
/dev/block/dm-3 /mnt/asec/com.runtastic.android.pedometer.pro-1 ext4 ro,dirsync,
nosuid,nodev,noatime,user_xattr,acl,barrier=1 0 0
/dev/block/dm-4 /mnt/asec/com.alarmclock.xtreme-1 ext4 ro,dirsync,nosuid,nodev,n
oatime,user_xattr,acl,barrier=1 0 0
/dev/block/dm-5 /mnt/asec/com.kaitenmail-1 ext4 ro,dirsync,nosuid,nodev,noatime,
user_xattr,acl,barrier=1 0 0
/dev/block/dm-6 /mnt/asec/com.eamobile.sims3_na_qwf-1 ext4 ro,dirsync,nosuid,nod
ev,noatime,user_xattr,acl,barrier=1 0 0
/dev/block/dm-7 /mnt/asec/com.asrazpaid-1 ext4 ro,dirsync,nosuid,nodev,noatime,u
ser_xattr,acl,barrier=1 0 0
/dev/block/dm-8 /mnt/asec/fishnoodle.aquarium-1 ext4 ro,dirsync,nosuid,nodev,noa
time,user_xattr,acl,barrier=1 0 0
/dev/block/dm-9 /mnt/asec/mobi.infolife.taskmanagerpro-1 ext4 ro,dirsync,nosuid,
nodev,noatime,user_xattr,acl,barrier=1 0 0
/dev/block/vold/179:49 /storage/external_sd vfat rw,dirsync,nosuid,nodev,noexec,
relatime,uid=1000,gid=1015,fmask=0702,dmask=0702,allow_utime=0020,codepage=cp437
,iocharset=iso8859-1,shortname=mixed,utf8,errors=remount-ro 0 0
shell@android:/ $

 

[jlindy]

How much does anybody know about fastboot mode? Could I boot my tab into fastboot then be able to set /system to -rw? If I could do that then I could push su into /system/xbin if that's where it would go, either that or /system/bin.

 

[CapeNick]

Hey Mr jlindy, have a look at this, showing a little promise, at least someone else seems to be working on this http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2018461

 

[jlindy]

Hey Mr jlindy, have a look at this, showing a little promise, at least someone else seems to be working on this How to root the Acer A110 Iconia Tab? - xda-developers

Thanks for the link... Everything I've tried so far has failed... The biggest problem is getting su copied into /system/bin, I'm exploring some possibilities using the dd command.

 

[Skellums]

Not sure if you're still working on anything here, we've been making SOME progress over at XDA.. The more eyes we get on this the better!

[Q] Acer Iconia A110 same root method? - xda-developers

We have 2 users who have been able to root (they were on 4.1.1), and a somewhat working recovery. It works if you're still on 4.1.1 it seems, but isn't very useful for 4.1.2. We're still working on it!!

 

[jlindy]

Got root?... YES AH DO! Go here==>[ROOT] Acer Iconia Tab A110 (All Things Root) - xda-developers follow the instructions implictly, and of course all warnings apply as to voiding your warranty, bricking your tab you're on your own, ect...

BTW I'm on 4.1.2, and this works for it.