[SoaS] Small SoaS Disaster

[Sebastian Dziallas]

Hi Caryl,

Caryl Bigenho wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I was playing in "PC Land" yesterday, trying to get a working SoaS
> Blueberry. Downloaded the live usb maker from the net. Made the stick.
> Put it in daughter-in-law's medium-sized hp netbook and tried it. After
> we finally got it booted (she insisted it wouldn't work, only Windows
> would) she pushed some button or clicked some icon and there it was!

I'm glad to hear that it worked. As the instructions for Strawberry 
explain, one might need to adjust the BIOS settings to boot from a USB 
key [1].

> Tried Speak... great... spoke reasonably good Spanish. Tried paint...
> beautiful. Checked the Journal... working fine. Checked out TamTam
> Mini... it froze. Did a force quit. Started it up again and tried to
> make another stick with Strawberry. Totally crashed the PC!

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by saying that it totally 
crashed the computer. Sugar on a Stick doesn't touch the computer's hard 
disk at all. As soon as you reboot and unplug the USB key, you should 
get your known environment back.

> It kept trying to start up, said it was fixing the system software, shut
> down, started up again...etc over and over and over! Finally, after more
> than an hour of this, she did a force quit and put it away.

I'm a bit lost here, since I don't know the details of what was going 
on. Without a concrete error message, it's hard to guess at what 
happened. For example, did you unplug the USB key?

> Is it possible that there is a virus in:
>
> http://fedorahosted.org/liveusb-creator
> <http://fedorahosted.org/liveusb-creator > ??????

I'd be very very surprised to see this. I don't even know how the 
liveusb-creator should have caused what you're describing. Besides that, 
the people working on this project are all well regarded and trusted 
members of the communities.

To make sure everything's fine, I've scanned the LiveUSB Creator file 
online. All anti-virus systems returned that no threat was detected [2].

> While she has other computers, this is a very bad disaster! My son, the
> PC guru says not to worry, "you can't break a PC." I sort of doubt him.
>
> Any ideas about what could have happened, how to fix it, and how to
> avoid it next time?
>
> Thanks,
> Caryl

--Sebastian

[1] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick/Strawberry#Boot_it
[2] 
http://virusscan.jotti.org/en/scanresult/bc3aecc2f6b5062cde6c815ae10452ed51b88049