From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.2) Gecko/20021126 Description of problem: Linux does not detect that it is writing to a write-protected hard drive. I can perform "write" operations to a write-protected hard drive and NO errors are flagged. Seagate ST34371W w/ Adaptec 2930 scsi controller. RH 7.2 Below is a clip from some usenet posts: What was really odd was that I could mount the drive, delete directories and `ls` would show them as gone. Eeverything looks normal. But the next time I mount the drive, the directories would be there again! This is the kind of thing that would have people believe in ghosts. I remembered that I've seen drives with a pin setting for "write-protect". I pulled the drive out, and sure enough *the drive was write-protected*! What's very curious is the fact that none of the write operations to the drive resulted in an error. Neither `fdisk`, `rm`, nor `dd` writes ever resulted in an error. Seems like a write to a write-protected hard drive, like to a floppy disk, should result in an error! Interestingly, when I tried to use a Win98 version of `fdisk`, it responded with an error message that it couldn't read the drive data, and exited. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. mount a drive with write-protection turned on 2. attempt write operations on the drive, e.g., delete a directory 3. unmount drive 4. re-mount drive - Notice that none of the operations took... Expected Results: OS would have responded that the media cannot be written to. Additional info: I don't know if this is, in fact, a bug. Not all manufacturers have a "write-protect" feature, but I have noticed it on Seagate drives. I don't know if the drive makes any indication to the OS that it is write-protected so that this could be detected. Low-priority. No data is lost due to this. You just get confused for a little while...
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