Hellorld!

I'm having a little problem with really old technology here. I'm trying to copy a Linear Flash PCMCIA card and I'm not succeeding. The computer and OS I'm using are very old as well, so I hope to find somebody with knowledge here.

Some technical info: The Flash cards need 12V to write to, hence the old hardware. The card with which I'm experimenting is a 16MB S2 card, the PCMCIA interface-card is a SCM-SBI-C2P ISA with 2 slots and a Vadem chipset in an Asus P3B-F with a P3-600 running Win98SE. The Software I'm using is Card Explorer v1.5.6 from ELAN. The end-goal is to make a backup-copy of a card with diagnostic software for Korean cars from the last Millennium. ?? I do have the diagnostic hardware to test the cards. The card I'm working with also contains diagnostics software, but that one can be erased and is going the be the backup-copy.

I started with making file copies of the cards. Then I took the spare card, erased it and wrote the source-card file to the spare card. Write OK. Compare failed.

I can successfully erase the spare card. It's all zeros. I can read the cards just fine. The binary data files that I can extract contain strings in plain text which isn't garbled or anything (see bit-errors below). Repeated reads always produce the same data (CRC). So read is working.

If I erase the spare card and then re-write its backup back to the card, the write is OK and so is the comparison. Same checksum and everything. The card works in the tester.

If I write anything else to the card, the content of the card differs from the file I just wrote. I've created a test-file containing incrementing bytes from 00 to FF over and over again. A comparison between the original and the written data reveals something peculiar: In every byte, the first two bits are always 1. Logic suggests that a hard- or software-failure would have less reproducible errors and/or more randomness.

Why isn't the same corruption happening when restoring the spare card from the backup? What is going on here?

I have ignored the attribute area of the card so far. Would that come into play somehow?

Any help is appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Googlhupf