This was such a basic, newbie mistake that everyone I knew who had ever worked even minimally in embedded couldn't believe they were that incompetent and inexperienced.
Telecom systems and ISP people were also astonished, as it is quite normal for core switching and routing equipment to have a very limited write endurance solid state boot and OS storage device. For a long time very serious $300,000+ routers booted off compact flash cards, back in the day.
Yep. I worked on those myself and participated in the usual pre-DVT destructive testing of our embedded flash devices specifically to count core dumps and config commits that the device could survive..
