I have a USB which is write protected:
dmesg | tail
[10098.126089] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is on
[10098.126098] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 23 00 80 00
[10098.126779] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdb] No Caching mode page present
[10098.126788] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
[10098.131418] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdb] No Caching mode page present
[10098.131425] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
[10098.133335] sdb: sdb1
[10098.135509] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdb] No Caching mode page present
[10098.135515] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
[10098.135521] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI removable disk
How can I turn the write protection off?
What I've tried
- Checked if it has a hardware switch – no
- Tried to format it on windows and on Linux (via terminal too)
- Tried
fdisk
|chmod
- Tried to fix this with several tools from Ubuntu software center
- Used Google and have seen about 10,000 discussions about this problem but they were never solved
Additional information
fsck -n /dev/sdb1
fsck from util-linux 2.19.1
dosfsck 3.0.9, 31 Jan 2010, FAT32, LFN
There are differences between boot sector and its backup.
Differences: (offset:original/backup)
65:01/00
Not automatically fixing this.
Free cluster summary wrong (968250 vs. really 911911)
Auto-correcting.
Leaving file system unchanged.
/dev/sdb1: 50 files, 93653/1005564 clusters
fdisk -l
Device boot. Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 32 8060927 4030448 b W95 FAT32
umount /dev/sdb1
mkfs -t vfat /dev/sdb1
mkfs.vfat 3.0.9 (31 Jan 2010)
mkfs.vfat: unable to open /dev/sdb1
Best Answer
To turn off disk device`s write protect, we use the low level system utility hdparm like this:
where we asume that
/dev/sdb
is the Physical disk device we're working on. If the device has partitions that are mounted as read-only, you should re-mount 'em as read-write in order to write data to them.Hope that helps.