As some might have followed I came across a camera in recent tests that just crashed on switch to Rec mode. With or without CHDK. For a consumer this camera would have been gone for good. With our capabilities here I knew I had dumped the cameras Firmware in 2014 and I re-dumped it today. srsa_4c helped identify the bit that had faded and quickly provided a Canon Basic script to re-instate said byte. Miraculous healing and a camera back from the dead.
Still this was revealing. Wow. I thought does that happen this often? I mean I have like 100 cameras, well maybe two but they advertised the 100 millionth Ixus Camera few years back. So what - a million dead cameras due to using Flash to store the Firmware? What in 5, 10, 15, 20 or 25 years from now? More broken than working? That is not data storage built to last. Even the buried ATARI E.T. game catridges (allegedly worst game of the age in a collapsing market and so forth) should easily outlast this.
Anyway, I figured I'd start this lounge thread on the subject. Right now what I wonder is along the lines of what makes this more likely to happen. Does the Flash have to be cut off from power for a long time, as in a camera on a shelf without a battery? Would re-availability of power re-cycle the flash memory so that the degrading cycle would be stopped? or does it actually need to be re-written? Can anything be done about it in form of a maintenance script that reads a position a number of times and if it does not change under reading re-writes it? Etc... I'll add some quotes as post No. 2 below...
Curious on what y'all think about this.
