Joel Wilcox wrote:
> The Lexar recovery software did a great job. Got everything back and
> anything else that hadn't been written over in the meantime.
>
> At 06:26 PM 5/7/2005 -0400, you wrote:
>
>>First, I would advise you in the future to never have your computer
>>write back to the CF card. Supposedly it's logically a standard FAT or
>>FAT-32 disk but I've heard too many stories of incompatibilty with the
>>camera. Perhaps it's nothing but the directory structure that the
>>camera expects but I prefer to stay away.
>
>
>
> I think I'll stay away henceforth as well.
>
> But, yes, it sounds like you haven't tried it,
This is very true. I don't have any Olympus digital gear or software.
and in fact it has never
> been a problem to write to the CF card, and that certainly wasn't the issue
> in this case (unless attempting to delete is a form of writing -- not being
> a smart aleck, since I think deleting is really writing a filename
> change?).
When it works as it's supposed to it's only a single bit that gets
changed. The bit indicates that the file has been deleted and that any
space occupied by the file is available for re-use (if needed). The
space will not actually be re-used unless there is no other free space
available. This is precisely to allow for recovery of accidentally
deleted files. To show my age, I was actually there when this design
change was made to PC-DOS about 20 years ago. Your camera runs a DOS clone.
Although it's only a single bit that is supposed to change it's not
possible to read or write anything other than "clusters". A cluster is
a group of 1 or more "sectors" which are blocks of 512 bytes. So,
changing a single bit means reading and writing a minimum of 512 bytes
and possibly much more depending on CF size. If the Oly software has a
bug (what software doesn't) it gives it an opportunity to corrupt
something else in that block of data. I believe in not offering the
opportunity if it can be helped.
But if this is bad practice, I blame Ag Schozz entirely, since
> he put me on to the practice of doing all sorts of things in Viewer prior
> to transfer to the hard disk -- no doubt to punish me for getting my OM
> adapter before he did. My revenge will be calculated and subtle. >:^P
>
> (OK, just kidding, Ken.)
>
>
>>All that said, it would appear that you've located a bug in Olympus
>>Viewer. Hard to say what it actually did except that it wrote some
>>trash to the CF card somewhere. I think it's highly unlikey that it
>>actually erased all the images, however.
>
>
> All's well that ends well. First time through the software located all my
> .jpgs. I had to go to preferences and change them to get it to find my
> ORFs during a second pass.
I was pretty well convinced that you hadn't actually lost more than a
single file if anything at all. Glad it all worked out and that you
were able to use it. Since the version 2 software was labeled an
upgrade I thought you might have to have version 1.5 already installed
and version 1.5 was not on the web site.
>
> Thanks again, Chuck.
>
> Joel W.
>
>
>
>
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