XPe tip #32: Best practices for power interrupt safety on headless devices

What if you are creating a headless device (truly headless - with no VGA - or just with no console devices attached such as keyboard and mouse) and you want to make sure the OS runs stable and reliable if an power interrupt occurs.

Below is list of things you may want to look at in the XPe documentation or that make common sense.

- Use UPS (Uninterpretable Power Source).

- Make use of XPe Write Filters: EWF/FBWF - protecting the storage media with write filters will make it more reliable for the system to recover: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms912906.aspx, http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa940926.aspx.

- Headless support - this is what you may need if no console devices are attached to or supported by your hardware: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms932872.aspx.
Also, it may be a good idea to remove newdev.dll library (Add Hardware Control Panel component) from your image so that there is no GUI fired up if new hardware is attached to the target device.

- Don't include Safe Mode and Dr. Watson components in your image.(http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms940820.aspx)

- Setup the system crash dump procedure to restart the PC automatically when a GPF occurs. Set the following reg.entry:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\CrashControl],"AutoReboot"=dword:1

- Get rid of all [most of] system popups and message boxes that may get your system GUI unintentionally locked:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/embedded/aa731206.aspx,
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms933122.aspx.

- It often makes sense to create your own custom shell for the target XPe OS where you can control the GUI behavior (to make it more "headless compliant") and get rid of Explorer Shell that is not really headless friendly: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms913692.aspx.