sfbp

My DVD/HD recorder (been on the market for over a year) has an SD slot in it with facilities to play presumably both music and video.

Great. So the GPS would still work even with the 27K resistor there? Forgive me for being so stupid..... The one thing I don't want to do is mess up a working piece of equipment.

Aha! Some dumb questions: 1. Will that 27K affect other things that might plug into the PS? 2. Why does this stop the Sony from working at all when plugged in? I couldn't even get either unit to play anything. 3. Does this mean that the GPS already has a 27K inside it somehow, or is this just a Sony thing? Assuming the answer to #1 is YES, can you tell me what parts I am looking for to make an extension cable (or perhaps if some kind manufacturer already made one) with the resistor embedded in it. Thanks

Do you get longer charge times (sorry I mean discharge times) as a result? I have a GPS in my car which has a cigaretter-lighter powersupply that delivers USB charging for the GPS - and this same PS point blank refuses to charge my NH700, or the RH1. In fact neither machine will even come on (weird!) plugged into that powersupply. What gives? I can't tell you the rating as I hid it behind the console and I would have to unscrew everything again to look. The Sony cigaretter lighter charger (a different one) I have for using MD in my car will charge the earlier, non-USB models (eg NF810) and it is rated at 3.0V 1000mA. Another point to note: when I have my "universal" powersupply (bought from the drugstore) set to 4.5V, it won't charge the 3V machines same as above. So it's not necessarily true that too much voltage will lead to better charging. It often just cuts off and won't work at all. Maybe you can enlighten me as to what is happening in all of these different cases.

Agree. But if you need 6V to fully charge a 3V battery (as it seems) then maybe you cannot do it via USB. And the RH1 can only charge via USB. Whereas the NH3D goes direct to the charging circuit. Makes sense to me, but what do I know?

But if it takes 6V to get fully charged, it's probably not safe to put 6V on the USB bus, right?

I don't have a second machine with LIP-4WM, but what you say makes perfect sense. My guess is that they were forced to compromise to allow charging to take place via USB as well as "from the wall" and in some sense there had to be some limiter placed to make that safe. The NH3D appears to take power but not **charge** via USB, correct? Help me out someone who has USB knowledge.......

Either that or running SI Backup, it just occurred to me.

Now I'm curious. What puts stuff into the "restorable" folder, the act of running the SI Restore Tool? Is that why there's nothing there on my system at the momenet?

Presumably the interesting thing is the NAME of the file(s). A bunch of hex digits. Sounds like the 4 bytes might be the private key to that hex string?

I just looked at this.... the DRM key is presumably in the hidden folder OpenMG\OMGRIGHT ?? There's some pretty complex stuff in there, looks like SS is set up for dynamic update.

Good point. I just cannot keep adding terabyte drives to pre-Vista equipment, and the experience I have with external enclosures has not been that stellar.

Ah, I missed that. The ones I have in HD recorder are SD, seems to be ubiquitous. The reader I have in 'puter reads micro too. I presume the manufacturing costs of micro are much lower. Doesn't bode well for DHS though. They must be worried sick about missing one of these in someone's bags.

Not sure why I'd care about that - LP2 is not a format for archiving, so the defragging and stuff it does is of no particular interest. SP, OTOH is another matter. Armed with one of these, the MD becomes a nice place to actually archive things, albeit only 80 minutes at a time.

For once I am going to present the opposite POV - don't all shriek at me, I love MD just as much as anyone. The drives for this device (in fact a drive shaped object that does 18 other things as well) are now about $20-30 in a computer, and are therefore fairly common. Even my DVD hard disk recorder has a slot for one. So it might be the new floppy disk..... better than a thumb (USB/flash) drive, I think.

Can't find it. Maybe someone made a remark which led me to deduce that, when describing the efforts to protect their DRM. As you are the expert on (all) the details..... Meanwhile I had another idea for the folks with Vista to consider. I recall Sony saying (and some people confirming) that Sonic Stage doesn't work well with anti-virus, because too much CPU bandwidth is taken by the scanning. I'm sure that this advice goes for all such scanners anyway. Could it be that Microsoft's Malicious Software Removal Tool just got too big for its boots? I would expect some people with XP to be complaining, but you never know. Avrin and myself are obviously those who tend to resist updates...... Try removing the Software Removal Tool (if that's possible). I know that Symantec (for example) is so deeply embedded in a Windows PC that I had highly technical friends begging me to spend an hour to get rid of it when they had tried for 2 days and failed. It took some brutal steps, I can tell you. Stephen

I thought it was when you were describing how the security is implemented. Maybe someone else. I'll try and find the reference.

Sorry I was thinking of copying 1 to 1, my error.

High speed dubbing it's not transferring PCM, but the SP, so compression (codecs) don't enter in to it, surely? Otherwise it wouldnt be able to do x4? Correct me if I am wrong, somebody

Here: http://minidisc.org/part_Sony_MZ-N707.html Good luck Typically the service manuals hide how to get into service mode. The recipe is usually the same except for the small detail that in some you press Vol-in others hold down the group button or Tmark.

Avrin mentioned something about SS using self-modifying code. I wonder if Vista SP1 is preventing this? I think you have no choice but to uninstall the service pack following the instructions (by Microsoft) I have posted the link to in this thread (2 posts up). Let's at least establish that SP1 is the culprit. Then maybe we can find out exactly which update within that is at odds with SS. I think this is about the 4th or 5th report, and SP1 was released in July sometime, so far supports the idea. BTW you are running as an administrator, I hope?

Wait a second!!!! On my machine the driver is always in two places, where you found it, and also in windows\system32\drivers I bet that's what Microsoft did. Try seeing if it's even possible to put NETMDUSB.SYS into the windows system drivers directory (above). Maybe they are preventing anyone from even putting the device driver there. If one part of SS loads the copy in the "MD folder" as you describe it (yes I know where you mean) and another part goes and loads the one in windows\system32\drivers, this might explain the odd behaviour. I might even try to reproduce this by removing it from Windows XP myself. (added later) No luck, I haven't convinced Windows to lock me out of the directory. Maybe this is some fancy Vista feature. But it definitely is copying the driver from "MD folder" into windows\system32\drivers, and loading it from there, which you can see if you look at the properties of the NetMD driver in Device Manager. So you should see if there is ALSO a copy under Vista (possible vista even puts such drivers in a different place).

So it's stopping without you ever seeing the word "Saving" on the N1? Gotta be that Vista has taken it into its head to consider this device channel insecure. Is there some sort of "secure device list" in Vista? Did you get the "nasty" threat warning about Windows not working when you installed Sonic Stage in Vista about the device not being trusted by by Microsoft? Anyone who's ever put Widcomm's Bluetooth software (most commercially available BT for PC use it) will recognise this "feature". Is there a way to make ALL Vista devices temporarily insecure (sacrilege!) to test the theory? For example, does SS work in Safe Mode? (I've no experience, and not as a solution, of course, just as something to try). Time to start looking in the Microsoft support groups for information about security upgrades locking out devices....... (added) PS there's good news in all of this: it may help us figure out the strange mechanism SS has used for all these years to prevent certain data transfers involving particular DRM-ed files to/from particular devices, which no-one, not even Avrin (?!? maybe I am wrong) has been able to document with any degree of clarity. I recall some comment about self-modifying code. I looked quickly on the web and it seems there are indications that "memory has been randomized" and that Symantec and McAfee got around this but are now locked out in some way. Could be Sony's application did rather the same thing. Time for Vista owners to start yelling at Sony, perhaps? (added again) Here's the link to how to uninstall SP1 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/948537

I just did a little quiet observation on the "95%" thing. On a working NetMD, there are three stages: a. the "conversion" which happens asynchronously - if you do a bunch of tracks, the later ones will get "converted" while the earlier ones are still being transferred b. the transfer up to "95%". During this there is no obvious activity on the minidisc. Mind you I am not sure what happens with a very large file, maybe it happens in steps. What I think happens with a short track is that the whole thing gets buffered at the MD. I'm sure someone can tell us how much buffer memory there is. A 4 minute track at LP2 is only about 7MB, so there's lots of scope for odd behaviour if the MD cannot buffer the full 300MB, which I am sure on the earlier models it cannot. c. Now SS says "95%" and in sequence on the device we see "Saving" "Edit" (I assume this refers to TOC edit, just like on a deck). Once the "Edit" phase is complete, the transfer is done, and SS marks the screen as a full blue square for transferred track on the right hand pane of the display. Interesting to know if it dies BEFORE or AFTER "Saving". Stephen PS what you might want to do is inspect the USB driver list to see if there is a NetMD device and if so, what drivers it is using. Try to compare with the same thing in XP, if you can, since under XP it is likely working correctly.

I don't think ANY version of SS is going to resolve this. The sooner you get to roll back the updates (remember you have a limited time to do it as Windows does a rolling strategy where new backups overwrite the old ones) the better. The 95% sounds like the final step of encrypting the files or headers or whatever when the transfer has been made is failing. I'm sure someone will say this doesn't make sense, but I would guess there is something in the certificate chain that had to be renewed. What you MIGHT do is to see if TOC cloning (see raintheory's sig info) gets you the track you just sent. This would tend to confirm the idea that it's only some final header information is what is not getting written. Another thing is to see if the NETMDUSB.SYS driver has been zapped (by the Vista upgrade install). I am not yet familiar enough with what the different components of the drivers do in communicating with NetMD devices.