On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 3:18 PM, Gary C Martin <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 29 Jul 2009, at 04:10, Caroline Meeks wrote: > > This is a good idea! >> >> Can I also ask you and Tomeu to help me with another, complimentary >> approach? >> >> As I hiked up the mountain on the weekend I got a lecture from one of my >> friends on different file system options and journaling. He has some time >> to help us. Today at the Expo I went to I met someone who had one of the >> patents on USB sticks. She is also willing to help us. >> >> I'd like to get our problems defined, resources and documentation linked >> up and then put together some specific requests for help that I can put out >> to my linkedin, facebook, and APO networks. >> >> Can you guys help me create the wiki pages that would let people >> understand our problems and find what they need to learn easily for some of >> the specific problems we don't know how to solve. >> > > The most authoritative and frightening item I've read on this is from > Mitch: > > http://wiki.laptop.org/go/How_to_Damage_a_FLASH_Storage_Device > > There was a detailed discussion thread back in February at: > > http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2009-February/022987.html > > I'm sure this is not the only culprit, but it's likely an important one. > > I'm no expert in the live image process but here's my current random theory > for the login screen case anyway (to be proven wrong so we can move on > please :-) A live image has a kind of overlay file where the actual users > changes are being written, if a kid unplugs too early, or hits some other > media write issue, that overlay could be corrupted. Likely loosing all user > changes to the original base image (and some), the stick would still boot, > but bail out when it hits the corrupt overlay. Dropping the user at a login > prompt (but with nothing to login to as that part is corrupt). End of random > theory. This makes sense to me and I added it to the wiki. http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick/TODO#Sticks_are_dieing_a_lot_-_Make_sticks_more_robust > > > You'd need to carefully analyse the broken stick images to resolve this > one. Not sure of the tools you'd need. Maybe. I am currently very suspicious of our file formatting. I want to know how it works and why it was chosen. then I want to find out why Open Suse and other distributions picked their choices. I don't have any information but its feeling like we have a "fine crystal" file format and what we want is a file structure that wraps the files in hard plastic so they will be ok even if a few bytes are disturbed. Hopefully we'll get more info. Right now I feel like all I know is how little we know. :) Which is actually a useful piece of information. > > > Regards, > --Gary > > -- Caroline Meeks Solution Grove [email protected] 617-500-3488 - Office 505-213-3268 - Fax
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