Robin Laing wrote:
I tried that on one of my SanDisk Cruzer the other night. I tried
different versions of dd, even to the point of over writing the whole
drive using dd.
From what I could find, the partition that is uses is a read-only
partition and is hardware controlled. Some code in the removal software
must turn this on/off. I know that the windows software writes directly
to the video driver and won't work with dual display monitors.
Some, at least, modern drives have a protected area (look up HPA) that
can be enabled (on the PC) by BIOS settings, and presumably by the BIOS
(and maybe later) when the drive's initialised.
I'm guessing that these drives also have this feature, but that Linux
(and maybe Windows) can't use it. However, it might be that on Windows,
software specific to these devices bypasses Windows to control it. I
presume there are some ATA/SCSI-type extended commands that can be sent
through the USB bus, maybe using reserved flags and/or fields.
--
Cheers
John
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