USB flash write protect

[Jason Shein]

On April 9, 2005 05:25 pm, William Park wrote:
> 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

Thats what I tried in the first place.

It always seems to work, but then when you try to mount it it returns:

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda1,
       missing codepage or other error
       In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
       dmesg | tail  or so


even when I specify the filesystem type.

Really funny thing I found out though. Just for kicks, I thought I would try 
it on a WinXP machine. It says the filesystem is not formatted, so would I 
like to format it. I select yes, then I watch in amazement  as it starts to 
format the stick. 10%...30%....60%...100%...120%..145%...ERROR -> huh? I 
think I have to get a screenshot of this one.


-- 
Jason Shein
Director of Networking, Operations and Systems
Detached Networks
jason-xgs8i/e9EeWTtA8H5PvdGCwD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org
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http://www.detachednetworks.ca
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