I have successfully applied the suggested BIOS mod to the Acer Iconia 6120 dual touch screen netbook. Although menu is much more verbose (and moderately useful to me), the BIOS still doesn't recognize that there's an mSATA SSD drive in the port on the unit. It's definitely receiving power but the machine doesn't know it's 'there'. The objective is to boot from the mSATA drive, and then mount a 1TB drive in the 2.5" bay for housing virtual instrument libraries, music projects, and audio files. Honestly I didn't think that Acer would make it this difficult to do, since their 'pure' tablets use the mSATA and *only* the mSATA for OS and data. My background is fairly technical - at one time I built musical instruments with Bob Moog - one of the original guys that created the synthesizer industry. I haven't done that much board work on the micro/mini component scale, but it doesn't exactly scare me either. Again, maybe it's my naivete, but I have a hard time imagining a board mod would be required. If so - so be it. Anyway, if anyone has a pointer on how to do a low-level check to see whether the device can be seen on a machine level, and then suss out how to create the endpoint that will allow the BIOS to recognize and mount it, I'd be eternally grateful. And of course, if someone has done this kind of work before and can crib me through it, I'd be happy to discuss a payment/bounty for helping me successfully complete he job. I hope that's not transgressing a rule or form of etiquette here - I'm simply in earnest to get this done so I can finish building out my 'portable studio'. Thanks in advance for your help.
Can you make an exact copy of the hard disk and try again? I think there is some hidden partitions or informations?
Hey there lphovercraft! That's exciting that you got to work with Bob Moog. I am a musician/keyboardist myself. I have some small but powerful recording/processing equipment & software (Presonus Studio One 3 Professional DAW, Presonus model 192 Audio Interface) that I would like to use with this laptop if possible. I came into obtaining a fairly new (almost unused) Iconia 6120 from a friend of mine. Of course, the huge feature for myself from this Iconia 1620 would be the dual touch-screens with the bottom screen becoming a touchscreen mixer (controlling the bottom half of my DAW software). Yes, I know it is a 1st generation i5 CPU and limited to 8G max memory, and I know there are no other spec. variations of this product/model from Acer other than that. However, I have searched various blogs for info on this subject. I am interested in upgrading this laptop, ...but primarily its CPU and its memory. The easiest upgrade it seems is replacing the hard drive with an SSD drive, which several vendors online seem to have compatible for this laptop. So far, I have only found that the "possibly-compatible" CPUs to potentially upgrade to (from the original 1st gen Intel Core Mobile i5) are the similiar 1st gen. Core Mobile i7-640M or Core Mobile-Extreme 940XM (selling for approx. $71 at this time). Have you actually successfully replaced the CPU in the Iconia 6120 with one of these CPUs with successful results, and does it require tweaking a setting in the "unlocked" bios, presented on the Tech-Inferno blog site? More importantly, I would like to expand the memory from its maximum (8G) to 16G, which I believe will require an "unlocked" bios. Were you ever successful in upgrading the memory in this laptop beyond 8G with successful results using the "unlocked BIOS"? Please reply and let me know. Thanks again in advance. Cybersax