I had blogged a long time ago about using the OLPC XO for data recovery. I bought one as part of the give-one get-one program and was thrilled with it for 31 days.

On the day following the expiry of the warranty, my XO's keyboard failed. I put it on the shelf, not wanting to spend any money to fix it. Only recently have I discovered a fix for the "Sticky Keys" problem.

The problem is that some keys such as the left ALT or Control key get stuck and cause the desktop and keyboard to behave funny. The fix involves using thin strips of electrical tape to compensate for the lack of electrical insulation under the keypad. But the photo on the official site does not show the correct layer of the keyboard stripped away:

Stuck Keys (wrong): http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Image:Stuck_keys_fix.jpg

The photos on this blog show the proper result (Two layers of membrane need to be pulled back):
http://sparkyxo.blogspot.com/2008/08/sparky-gets-keyboard-fix.html

Proper Fix: http://sparkyxo.blogspot.com/2008/08/sparky-gets-keyboard-fix.html

So, It's like I just got it again! With an updated and fixed XO, I found this page and installed Ubuntu on a 2 Gig SD card and it runs perfectly. Next, I installed the Ubuntu-Rescue-Remix-Tools metapackage from the Intrepid PPA Repository (deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/arzajac/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main) and started recovering data.

For CPU and memory intensive tasks such as writing big files to an NTFS filesystem, or file-carving, it's slow. But not unreasonably so. For imaging faulty drives, it's on par with any other system. You can image roughly one Gig per minute using two external USB-connected drives (one source and one destination). The limiting factor in how long it takes to image a drive is related to hard disk performance and not CPU power.

The very small electrical requirements of this machine are ideal for use with a UPS. In case of a power failure, you don't want your last-chance recovery effort to be ended by running out of power. I will be testing how long this setup can run off my UPS.