<div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 3:18 PM, Gary C Martin <<a href="mailto:gary@garycmartin.com">gary@garycmartin.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> <div class="im">On 29 Jul 2009, at 04:10, Caroline Meeks wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> 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. </blockquote> </div> The most authoritative and frightening item I've read on this is from Mitch: <a href="http://wiki.laptop.org/go/How_to_Damage_a_FLASH_Storage_Device" target="_blank">http://wiki.laptop.org/go/How_to_Damage_a_FLASH_Storage_Device</a> There was a detailed discussion thread back in February at: <a href="http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2009-February/022987.html" target="_blank">http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2009-February/022987.html</a> 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.</blockquote> <div> This makes sense to me and I added it to the wiki. <a href="http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick/TODO#Sticks_are_dieing_a_lot_-_Make_sticks_more_robust">http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick/TODO#Sticks_are_dieing_a_lot_-_Make_sticks_more_robust</a> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> You'd need to carefully analyse the broken stick images to resolve this one. Not sure of the tools you'd need.</blockquote><div> 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. </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> Regards, --Gary </blockquote></div> -- Caroline Meeks Solution Grove Caroline@SolutionGrove.com 617-500-3488 - Office 505-213-3268 - Fax