[olpc-help] Activities no longer load, including Terminal; Flash failed

[Dylan Bennett]

My 2.5 year old son and 4.5 year old daughter love our OLPC. My son wanted to use the writing program tonight to write the names of his favorite animals, so I set it down in front of him and hit the power button. He knows not to touch it while it's booting, but tonight, while it was booting, my son sneezed on it after having eaten a bowl of Grape Nuts. It was a big, wet sneeze and a few of the droplets had little bits of Grape Nuts in them. I was wiping it off, not really paying much attention to it except to make sure I got it all off. (Thus, I may have inadvertently hit a bad combo of buttons.)

Unfortunately, when I set the OLPC back down, I noticed the Journal activity wasn't loaded. I thought that was kind of odd, but didn't think much of it until I started trying load the writing activity and it just sat there flashing like it was loading. It did this for quite a while, and was obviously hung, so I powered it down and started it booting again. When it came back up, the Journal still wasn't loading and no activities would load. They just sat there flashing.

I came online and found this thread. I did some link following and finally got to the Stable Upgrade page on the wiki (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Stable_Upgrade). I followed the instructions exactly. (And I should note that I downloaded the OLPC build 653 from the "latest" folder in the Official Releases folder (http://download.laptop.org/xo-1/os/official/latest/jffs2/).) While it was re-imaging there were three red blocks. In this post by Richard Smith of Laptop.org (http://olpc.osuosl.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=6789&sid=e5b6348ea32b0cebb0808800611d095b#6789), it's noted, "Oh and just FYI the red squares are bad blocks which are tested and marked bad at the factory. All nand flash has some amount of bad blocks." It got about a quarter to a third of the way through the blocks, filling them with green blocks, before it went very fast and filled the rest with blue blocks. It finished re-imaging and rebooted itself.

After booting up, everything seems to work fine now. The Journal activity is loading now too.