USB flash write protect

[Jason Shein]

I have 2 USB memory sticks that belong to a client that have a strange 
problem.

They are Kingston 512mb Data Traveller thumbdrives.

Mysteriously they have acquired "write protected" status, without an external 
switch on the drive.

I have tried a few things under linux for him. Re-partitioning made no 
difference, nor did the type of partition.

Tried     hdparm -r 0 /dev/sda1     made no difference.

When I try to format the device as fat it seems to work until I try to mount 
the drives. If I try to format them as ext3 I get back "could not write 8 
blocks in inode table starting at 483331: Attempt to write block from 
filesystem resulted in short write"

Has anyone ever run into this before? Searching around on Google resulted in a 
lot of other people with the same problem, but no solution.

Any ideas?


-- 
Jason Shein
Director of Networking, Operations and Systems
Detached Networks
jason-xgs8i/e9EeWTtA8H5PvdGCwD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org
( 905 ) - 876 - 4158 Voice
( 905 ) - 876 - 5817 Mobile
http://www.detachednetworks.ca
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