combating corruption to make my life better

[jaharr01]

Hey guys I been on a hiatus from arcades for a bit.In my time off I've been doing some thinking.The arcades I build mechanically never break or fail, the software always takes a big ---steaming pile of meadow muffin--- because the kids turn off the power switch or screw it up some how. Is there a way that you all keep the computers from getting corrupted, changed or whatever? Do you do like a special partition image? SSD with read only? It seems like that's the headache with this me is always going back and repairing mala or removing and replacing corrupted software from improper shut downs. Kids are the X factor, they always find ways to jack up computers. So what I was wondering was what you all do to combat this headache, besides beating your kids .I am far from a computer programmer, try to limit it to simpler fixes.
                                                                                                                                                               
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          Jay

[GeoMan]

Use Casper 10 from www.fssdev.com

I use it to clone PC hard drives using the built in scheduler (you can also do it manually). In case of a hd failure or corrupted OS just replace the drive with the backup drive - no time consuming restoring, booting from external hd/usb flash or anything else needed.

Because the backup is an exact clone of your boot drive you can also restore deleted/damaged files with simple drag and drop from the backup to the original hd.

[pbj]

Only kid proof setup is DOS MAME and a dedicated button for each input. As soon as you introduce a console, shifted inputs, or Windows you're boned.

[Mike A]

"combating corruption to make my life better"
I though this thread was going to be about Batman.

[vwalbridge]

From the sound of it, you are trying to combat 2 issues:

1. Corrupting the OS from an unexpected and sudden loss of power

2. Jacking up the front-end/emulator/OS from random button mashing


Kids will be kids and they will inevitably find a way to crowbar your arcade. However, I have 2 kids under the age of 6 and they don't have a problem with #1. If I could potty train my kids, then I can train them not to yank the power cord form the back of the machine. And you should be setting the power button on your machine to NOT shut down the computer. Your front-end should be dong that. (To enable a graceful shutdown)

As far as #2 goes...if you have a good front-end and have it set up well...then no amount of uncontrolled button mashing will mess anything up. I've seen my 3-year old conduct a full-blown button machine fit...no harm done.

[Thenasty]

I have set with DOS for years and years and I always turn it off with a flick of the switch.... no problem...

if you want a HEADACHE once only, setup DOS. Once that is done, no more HEADACHES until HD dies.

[Haze]

I have set with DOS for years and years and I always turn it off with a flick of the switch.... no problem...

if you want a HEADACHE once only, setup DOS. Once that is done, no more HEADACHES until HD dies.

There are plenty more drawbacks to using DOS tho, it simply can't use any semi-recent hardware properly.

If you're 100% happy with a setup, and not too worried about boot times then you could easily enough have the entire OS run from a bootable DVD / Bluray.  As long as your PC has enough RAM etc. you shouldn't need worry about a pagefile, and as long as disks aren't being written to there isn't likely going to be any corruption anyway, so even if you have the OS etc. running from read-only media you could put the roms / CHDs on a regular disk for better access times.

Of course, in that scenario you'd want to be 100% happy with the setup and all your configuration files first because in an environment where nothing gets saved you aren't going to be able to reconfigure it later.

Any setup where there is data being written is potentially going to suffer from data corruption if the power goes off mid-write (and with caching algorithms it might not even be obvious when that is)  Some people say SSDs are immune to this, but actually in some senses they can be worse (especially paired with older software - even Windows 7 as it doesn't *fully* support them)  This is because they often use 'idle' time to do their own internal housekeeping which can involve moving things around (which you won't be aware of, and an older OS won't be aware of either, so the element of risk is introduced)

[UEDan]

Deepfreeze?
Anything written on disk is discarded and any changes to existing files are replaced with "frozen" files at startup automatically.

[vwalbridge]

Deepfreeze?
Anything written on disk is discarded and any changes to existing files are replaced with "frozen" files at startup automatically.

Ah yes! How could I forget that software. Excellent suggestion. I use that for some work laptops that we "rent" to temp people. Really nice software.

[jaharr01]

Thanks guys some good food for thought. I appreciate the info

[lilshawn]

the main issue is windows changes file data and doesn't regularly update the FAT on the disk to reflect the change all the time in order to increase performance.

this "on the fly" data changing results in corrupted data if the system is shut off without being shut down properly so windows can clean up all the junk it's witten and update the FAT so the computer knows next time where the data is.

it's kinda like a company that requires you telephone them every time you want to use the company gascard, vs a company who lets you just hand in the receipts at the end of every week.

the advantage being... you don't have to waste time every single time calling and letting them know how much so they can keep record... the disadvantage being that if you lose your receipts, they have no idea how much you charged their card until they go searching through their credit card statement.

The downsides of an OS that has complete system level control of hardware but an old archaic way of handling data.

[aldub516]

my setup kind of works in stopping any changes to the pc and is kid proof.. i run hyperspin and remove any options to exit the front end. And my cab has only one power button which when pushed tell the pc to shut down/ turn on. So minus a kid just ripping the plug out of the wall behind the machine, there really is no way for them to mess with it. I have a decent pc and setup i dont really encounter software failure during use. So once they push the on button and it boots, they are playing games and theres nothing they can do besides power it off which tells the pc to do so safely.

[Grasshopper]

I can't comment on Windows, but a stateless system where the hard disk never gets written to is really easy to set up on Linux.

You basically need to mount the root filesystem as readonly, and then overlay it with a RAM disk. Thus means that, when a program thinks it's writing something to the hard disk, it's actually writing it to a RAM disk, and therefore any changes are automatically lost once the machine is switched off. This is how most Linux live CDs work.

It's easy to google for info on this technique, but here's a starting point:

http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/181421/building-a-read-only-linux-system-with-a-writable-layer-in-ram