S9 SD Card

Yes, the card. The screen image below is from the original card that came with my S9. It was returned to me after sending it in for compliance verification. The card currently in my machine is the one I've been using ever since I sent the in the original. I get the same results using the current card.

JeffL wrote:Yes, the card. The screen image below is from the original card that came with my S9. It was returned to me after sending it in for compliance verification. The card currently in my machine is the one I've been using ever since I sent the in the original. I get the same results using the current card.

Interesting. What is the software version of your S9? I think you find it in the clinician's menu under machine info, or something of the sort. All I can figure is it's a system file that you're not seeing in Explorer, maybe it's been eliminated, or the S9 is writing some sort of hidden data on the card that is not in regular file format.

I guess they did a good job of hiding it. I scanned a card with a file recovery program, and it showed up there. The card I scanned was one that I put in the machine yesterday, after formatting. I didn't actually use it, so there is no data in the Datalog file. I recovered the journal.dat file to my HD, and looked at it with a hex editor. It was 32KB of hex 00.

Found it! It's written as a system file, which was hidden.

Interestingly, when I looked for it using the DOS DIR command, it appears with both the /AH (show hidden). and /AS (show system) switches. I unchecked the "hide system files" in Windows, and that lets it show there. I sure love "beating a dead horse... Shows how annal retentive I am My next experiment will be to copy all the files, including journal.dat from one SD to another, and see if it works... but not tonight.

JeffL wrote:My next experiment will be to copy all the files, including journal.dat from one SD to another, and see if it works... but not tonight.

It won't. If you have a hex editor, or maybe the program you're using above will work, look and see where the starting cluster is for the journal.dat file. You'll see it is near the end of the disk (card) recording region. All usual copy processes start at low cluster numbers and continue forward. You would have to manually write the journal.dat file to one of the near-the-end clusters using a disk editor. As I recall though, looking at several of my cards that cluster number is not always the same. I speculate that the S9 may have an algorithm that maybe takes the date into consideration when deciding which cluster to start the file.

Remember back in the early days of DOS, '85 - '88 time frame, and Lotus 1-2-3 and the key disk (floppy) that you had to use to install and uninstall Lotus on the PC? There was no easy way to duplicate the key floppy back then because Lotus manipulated how data was actually written to the floppy. It was something like taking one track and writing it so that it had 7 sectors instead of 8 which was the norm. The Lotus program directly controlled the floppy drive to force it to write and read the one oddball track. No way on earth could a standard DOS utility duplicate the process. That's how Lotus in the early days foiled the process of making pirate copies. The S9 is doing something similar to the card, except it's doing it to ensure the integrity of the data on the card.

To give you more insight into how virulent the S9 is in protecting the card's data let me share my experience of a couple weeks ago. I forgot to copy the files from the card to my PC for 8 days so I lost one day. That deleted file was still on the card so I used WinHex to recover the file. It wrote a new copy of that file into the Datalog directory. I then used WinHex to manually modify the directory entry for the original deleted file to it would once again be visible. I then deleted the recovered copy. I put the card back into the machine, and bingo! The S9 choked on it and erased it. I thought the card had been returned to an original condition but obviously not. I put a card into the S9 to which I had added copies of additional hi-res files beyond the most recent 7 that S9 leaves on the card. That card did not cause the S9 to choke so apparently the existence of more than 7 days of hi-res data on the card doesn't bother the S9. It did delete the 8th day hi-res data though, but not days 9 and beyond. At least that's how I remember it.