[Marketing] press release opportunity...

[Gary C Martin]

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.

You'd need to carefully analyse the broken stick images to resolve  
this one. Not sure of the tools you'd need.

Regards,
--Gary