Motion LS800 table HD failure at 14,000 feet

Peter wrote:
snip
I reckon that, as a minimum, one would need to move the windoze
swapfile, and registry, to the SD card. Once upon a time I had to run
a program called Filemon to monitor disk accesses, to see why an auto
power-down SCSI HD would keep powering back up again, and I found a
registry access every 1 second or so, plus an access (for no apparent
reason) to every fixed HD every few minutes. This was on NT4 though.

What we really need to do is boot the OS from a flash disk and run it in
a ramdisk. This allows the OS to read / write its boot partition, but
does not rely on a hard drive to do it. I am not a Windows guy, so I
don't even know if that's possible without paying Micro$oft lots of
money for its development kits or embedded version, but common (and
free) Linux "Live" CDs such as Ubuntu run like that, so the basic
premise of operation is sound.

In fact, I just built a custom, full-featured Linux distribution that
takes up only 400MB on a flash disk and I wasn't trying to save space.
There are other distros such as Damn-Small-Linux that take up only 50MB.
So, at least with Linux, it's safe to say the OS won't consume the
flash disk. I have no idea what a minimum install of Windows consumes,
but it's a far cry from 50MB.

If the flight planning / charting software houses would stop drinking
the Micro$oft Kool-aid and migrate their apps to a cross-platform
development environment (Qt, Java, or GTK), it would be a relatively
simple affair to build a Linux-based system that runs entirely from
flash media.

And, of course, no discussion on the use of general purpose PCs in the
cockpit would be complete without a comment regarding stability. I have
Linux servers at work that have been up for over six months(!) Think
about that the next time your Windows-based tablet PC inexplicably hangs
just as you're about to start your approach. Been there, done that, but
I didn't get the T-shirt because we were VFR.

-Doug

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Doug Vetter, ATP/CFI

http://www.dvatp.com
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