USB flash write protect

[William Park]

On Fri, Apr 08, 2005 at 12:44:34PM +0000, Jason Shein wrote:
> 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?

Try manually,

    dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1
    fdisk /dev/sda      # partition it to your need
    mkdosfs /dev/sdaX
    mount /dev/sdaX /mnt/hd

-- 
William Park <opengeometry-FFYn/CNdgSA at public.gmane.org>, Toronto, Canada
Slackware Linux -- because it works.
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