NASA discusses the Spirit rover flash RAM glitch in detail....

[unixronin]

And you'll never guess the culprit.  Once again, Microsoft technology bites something really important in the ass.

Comments

[radarrider.livejournal.com]

DOS simply stands for Disk Operating System. Apple had a DOS, it was called DOS 3.3, and was succeeded by ProDOS. (Incidentally, MS-DOS 3.3 also existed; it was considered the best version of DOS prior to version 5.0).

As far as I know, the procedure in the FAT file system of replacing the first character of a file's name in the directory with a question mark was not so that the file could be undeleted, but probably just to keep the code simple. The entries in the file allocation table were zero'ed so the file could only be undeleted properly if it was contiguous, or if you used a third-party deletion tracking program.

The article doesn't say that the Wind River OS is using FAT or not. The problem is, as far as I know, consistent with the FAT directory structure. However, there are newer, better file systems and, at the time FAT was developed, it was on par with other file systems for personal computers. Besides, I don't know if MS even invented FAT anyway. MS-DOS grew out of CP/M and, if that OS used FAT as well, it's someone else's invention.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

The article doesn't say that the Wind River OS is using FAT or not.

True, it doesn't. However, I believe you'll find that the vast majority of flash memory applications, at least in consumer products, embed VFAT as the filesystem.