Autoreinstallation image is not signed.

[Kim Quirk]

John,
We experienced quite a large number of 'software broken' laptops when
we first starting shipping both in Uruguay and in the G1G1 program. I
thought one of the things Ivan did in Uruguay was to help them reflash
their laptops when they couldn't boot due to journal corruption or
other software related reasons. Not sure if this is the same problem.

How many do you think are recoverable with software reflash? Have they
been recovering these, or have these fallen into one of their other
piles of 'broken' laptops?

Thanks,
Kim

On Tue, Jun 3, 2008 at 6:47 PM, John Watlington <wad at laptop.org> wrote:
>
> On Jun 3, 2008, at 11:53 AM, C. Scott Ananian wrote:
>
>> On Tue, Jun 3, 2008 at 11:28 AM, ffm <ffm at cluenet.org> wrote:
>>> C. Scott Ananian-3 wrote:
>>>> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Olpc-update#USB_upgrade
>>> This will not work if the OS is not bootable and no alt-os image
>>> is on the
>>> disk.
>>
>> We should continue to try very hard not to let the OS become
>> unbootable.  If it is unbootable, something Very Wrong should have
>> occurred and there's no guarantee that "mount the filesystem and copy
>> off /home" will work either.  Using a dev key and a rescue disk is
>> probably a much better bet than any attempt at automagic.
>>
>> Please file bugs on ways you've managed to make the OS unbootable, or
>> ways the alt-os image breaks (there are a few); these are likely to
>> get more attention than trying to resuscitate a deprecated tool I
>> wrote for firmware security debugging.
>
> I agree completely with Scott.
>
> An interesting data point, however, is that over half of the machines
> sent for repair in Uruguay are fixed simply by reflashing the machine.
> This may be an artifact of the old build they are using, but it is a
> disturbing statistic.
>
> In recent months, I've only had to reflash to fix problems which
> happened right after a previous reflash (#6906).
>
>> That said, there's a separate bug in trac about X not starting when
>> the NAND flash is full.  I'm not sure if that's what you're referring
>> to as "not booting" or not, but we should fix that, too.
>>  --scott
>>
>> --
>>  ( http://cscott.net/ )
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