[Q] a500 bricked(ish) tried various recovery threads. help?

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For a few months now my a500 has been having problems, but I've only recently been able to spend some time looking at it. I've gone through many unbrick threads, and recovery threads, and bootloader patch threads, and am still stuck.

Here's the problem(i think): at some point I must have flashed a rom without wiping /data. Now when I use CWM to wipe the device it says it can't remove the packages.xml file.

After learning about the packages.xml file, i now understand why my tablet would force close, reboot, and generally behave badly, since the new rom can't write to the packages.xml file.

Edit: The solution was very simple, and I'm surprised it wasn't suggested in all the other "i can't delete packages.xml" threads i'd seen. The attribute flags on that file were set to immutable and append-only. I had busybox installed and was able to issue "chattr -r -i" on the file and then it removed fine and after flashing a new rom everything is glorious.

Here's what i've tried so far:
I've tried removing the file through adb, the adb shell, the terminal emulator on the tab itself.... no good.

I've tried using fastboot to reformat the data partition.... No good. apparently the HC bootloader doesn't allow this.

I've tried patching the HC bootloader, upgrading to the ICS bootloader.... this is where I'm stuck and need help

I can't get any of the utilities that are supposed to work over APX mode to work. I can get the tab into APX mode and it shows up both in windows as some Acer Iconia Something Recovery Something... but it seems as soon as the utility tries to send it commands the device disconnects. I tried this in linux as well with the same result. As soon as I send any commands to it via nvflash (even just "wait for device") it disappears from udev.

Can someone please help me either
1) figure out another way to just fix the permissions on the packages.xml file
2) figure out what is going wrong with apx mode
3) tell me another way to format the data partition.
4) tell me that i'm just missing something really obvious that is a 1 click fix?!

The bootloader you currently have in tha tablet doesn't have anything to do with APX mode. It is not used at all.

This is how APX works (simplified):
- Tegra2 CPU enters download mode, for which the software is written on one time programmable memory inside the processor itself
- APX waits in download mode for commands from nvflash utility
- nvflash downloads to tablet's RAM bootloader binary (the one you use in command line) together with other data like BCT and ODMDATA (those are actually not required by all APX commands)
- APX runs the bootloader downloaded to RAM (not the one in eMMC) and runs commands you give it with nvflash.

So APX support needs to be implemented in bootloader you download to the tablet (for example Skrillax_CZ's bootloader_apx.bin).

As for your main problem I'm afraid this probably means that your tablet's eMMC flash memory has failed. I'm not 100% sure but there shouldn't be any problem removing the file or formatting the partition using nvflash.

Post messages you get when using nvflash (whole output would be great). We will see where to get from there.

Thanks for getting back to me, I'm at work now so will mess around a little more when I get home.
for a little clarification when I was talking about the bootloader issue i think the utility i was thinking of was fastboot. I had seen some suggestions of using fastboot to format the partition and then found out that the HC bootloader doesn't work with fastboot. That's when I followed the trail to try to install the ICS bootloader and got into the APX stuff with nvflash, though it seems that if I can get nvflash working, I can format the partition with that and not need to flash a new bootloader.
As I said, I'll mess around a little more when I get home and post some logs, but I'm still worried about why the apx device disappears from my system as soon as i try sending it commands.

Hmmm you probably don't have your tablet's CPU ID. You need that in order to do anything in APX mode. It is somehow possible to get CPU ID from the APX itself but you would need to search the forum how to do it (AFAIK it is required to connect tab to a Linux machine to do that).