A friend of mine has a USB Flash drive that he uses on his mac that recently stopped working. OS X would give him the error: "You have inserted a volume that mac os cannot read." I then tried it on windoze and on linux and they both recognized it but wouldn't reformat it because it is "write-protected." I checked the slot on the side of the drive and it is in the unlock position. What can I do (qtparted only mounts it as read only) so I can reformat this drive and use it?
More info here:
http://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewt...126525#1126525
Thanks.
Garibaldi

i cant get exactly how did u make it work under linux
if it unlocked button open then it should work

lets do step by step

first check
____1 usb-core
2 <usb-chi>
these two packages will be there by default in RH9

install usb-storage module
#modprobe usb-storage

then
cd mnt
mkdir usb

edit fstab
add entry
/dev/sda1 /mnt/usb vfat noauto,user,umask=0 0 0

then plug in usb
#mount /mnt/usb

i hope it should be mounted and u may be able to format it.
or do as u like.

Thanks for the quick reply! My hd install is Slackware, & I'm guessing that it comes with usb-core and <usb-chi> installed. I didn't use that to mount it in linux however because I could just use the Knoppix 3.6 live-cd for this since once I give the flash drive back to my friend I won't have any use for the extra line in fstab, and its easier because Knoppix autodetects the drive. So in Knoppix I opened up QT parted in a terminal (check out the link I provided above for a complete error) and it said that it could only mount /dev/sda as read only. I then tried to create a new allocation table on the drive but it gave me an error. So I don't have as much trouble with recognizing it as accessing data on it because I need to reformat it to reset the permissions. I tried changing permissions for the drive in KDE as well but that also gave me an error.

One more thing, right now I'm in the Slax live-cd, which didn't auto detect the usb flash drive. So I went to a konsole and tried dmesg to see about my connected devices, and here is the error it gave about /dev/sda:
]

Try leaving it unmounted and run cfdisk /dev/sda - reformatting it may fix it.

I tried that, cfdisk could only read it, not write. So any way that you look at it for some reason this USB flash drive will only mount read only- why? This makes no sense. Is there some way I can bypass everything and completely corrupt it so I can format it and override this mysterious write protection, which exists for no reason (the button is in the un lock position and it was working fine and then one day it would only mount read only)??

You could try

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda

to completely corrupt it. . .

Ihave had the same problem. does the flash drive have a oti2168 controller? mine does and i can only format it with the software that came with it, if i try any other way i get the same errors. you can download the software and win98 drivers here . never mind the brand, as long as it's the same controller it will work. if it's a different controller you will have to find out which one it is and find corresponding software/drivers

I tried this but I have XP so it won't install. I even changed the compatibility to 98 but it still wouldn't install. Do you have any other suggestions? Maybe I'll try and find a computer with win 98.

So would this corrupt the drive and fix the read-only problem, so I could then reformat it, or would it just require a reformat in which case I wouldn't have accomplished anything?