Thanks for your questions. I like your work. I'll answer in order.
1. Several posts in this thread and your questions are about the stick. Old stick, another stick, how it was partitioned, FAT32 etc. Created under linux or windows.
Reading through the posts:
It didn't work, a different stick, and then it worked. No clear explanation. You get my thinking? Nothing definitive. It's a long time since I looked at boot sectors, volume labels, FAT tables etc.
But looking in the first sector is "ëX.mkfs.fat", volume label, etc. Are those fields (except the FAT table ) the same for every utility on different systems that are used to create the stick? I don't know.
2. I've confirmed that the bytes are written at sector 2,000,000 on a 2 Gb stick.
3. Yes. I tried that today.
4. Not really. I started out with 2 x 8GB sticks that didn't work and managed to find a 2GB stick. I can't find another old small one. So see 1. above.
5. Sort of the same as above. What is that trying to achieve? It's like we are not sure what is going on. I'd like to help.
Is it possible that before the DG-811 even looks for the bytes at sector 2,000,000, it expects a volume label, text string from creation utility, come what may, etc etc in first 2 sectors. On my stick all sectors above the first 2 are 00 until 2,000,000
"You can easily test the sector reading, as the DG does it. I don't have here the command but I can post." Yes. That could help.
I am suspicious that I seem I can't get this to work on the new firmware. If anyone has managed to achieve this on firmware 00.01.09.00.00 I'd be really pleased to know.
But it does seem that many are struggling with the usb stick and I'd like to help get to the bottom of that.