Difference between gdal versions in reading raster on two machines?

Question

I am using raster data from Afripop.org and using the R package raster (raster_2.0-41) to do all my computation. Everything has been working out just fine until I tried sending some jobs to a remote linux machine. When I read in the raster on one machine the values are correct but on the other there are no NAs and the population (i.e. sum of all the values) WAY off.

On the linux machine I get:

> civpop <- raster("data/apciv10v3.flt")

> civpop[1:10]
[1]   0  60  28 198   0  60  28 198   0  60

> civpop
class       : RasterLayer 
dimensions  : 7656, 7327, 56095512  (nrow, ncol, ncell)
resolution  : 0.0008333, 0.0008333  (x, y)
extent      : -8.599802, -2.494213, 4.357029, 10.73677  (xmin, xmax, ymin, ymax)
coord. ref. : +proj=longlat +ellps=WGS84 +towgs84=0,0,0,0,0,0,0 +no_defs 
data source : /home/andrewa/D4D/trunk/data/apciv10v3.flt 
names       : apciv10v3 
values      : 0, 255  (min, max)

One the other machine I (correctly) get:

R> civpop <- raster("data/apciv10v3.flt")
R> civpop[1:10]
 [1] NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA
R> civpop
class       : RasterLayer 
dimensions  : 7656, 7327, 56095512  (nrow, ncol, ncell)
resolution  : 0.0008333, 0.0008333  (x, y)
extent      : -8.6, -2.494, 4.357, 10.74  (xmin, xmax, ymin, ymax)
coord. ref. : +proj=longlat +ellps=WGS84 +towgs84=0,0,0,0,0,0,0 +no_defs 
data source : /Users/andrewa/Documents/D4D/trunk/data/apciv10v3.flt 
names       : apciv10v3 

If I use just rgdal I have the same issues so I guess it isn't an issue with raster. Any ideas?

Incorrect Machine (using GDAL 1.8.0, released 2011/01/12):

> civpop.gdal = readGDAL("data/apciv10v3.flt")
data/apciv10v3.flt has GDAL driver EHdr 
and has 7656 rows and 7327 columns
> civpop.gdal@data[1:10,1]
[1]   0  60  28 198   0  60  28 198   0  60

Correct machine (using GDAL 1.8.1, released 2011/07/09):

R> civpop.gdal = readGDAL("data/apciv10v3.flt")
data/apciv10v3.flt has GDAL driver EHdr 
and has 7656 rows and 7327 columns
R> civpop.gdal@data[1:10,1]
[1] NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA`

Answer 1

Some versions of gdal/ogr have trouble inferring the floating point structure of these files. I blogged about it:

http://geospaced.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/reading-afripop-data.html

and the essence is to add pixeltype float to the .hdr file.