Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ukma!rutgers!apple!claris!scott
From: scott@claris.com (Scott Lindsey)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple
Subject: Re: re: write-protecting hard drives
Message-ID: <8819@claris.com>
Date: 13 Feb 89 08:31:25 GMT
References: <890213043846.812082@DOCKMASTER.ARPA>
Organization: Claris Corporation, Mountain View CA
Lines: 29

From article <890213043846.812082@DOCKMASTER.ARPA>, by TMPLee@DOCKMASTER.ARPA:
> In response to my question about write-protection o fhard drives someone
> pointed out the protection bits in ProDos.  I'm afraid that without any
> address protection hardware they are useless -- any virus writer worth
> his salt would do direct block reads and writes, ignoring all of ProDos,
> which is why I was asking about a physical switch you could throw.

It's going to be dependant on your particular hard drive & interface card.
I've got a 60Mb CMS and there are jumpers on the SCSI card that you can set
(but this means powering down, pulling the card, etc.  I was experimenting
with this when I was trying to have more than one GS connected to the hard
drive at a time (I wanted the boot volume to be write-protected so it
wouldn't messed up by having more than one instance of GS/OS accessing it at
a time.  Unfortunately, there's a bug in GS/OS where it returns the Disk-is-
write-protected as an error instead of a status during the boot sequence.

This was the case with a pre-release version of GS/OS; I haven't tried it
with the final version, but I was given the impression by Apple that it
wouldn't be fixed.  It's not exactly something that would be a common problem.

I don't know if the problem lies with write-protected hard-drives in general
or just those that use a generated driver.


-- 
Scott Lindsey, wombat    | UUCP: {ames,apple,portal,sun,voder}!claris!scott
Product Development      | Internet:  scott@claris.com  |  AppleLink: LINDSEY1
Claris Corp.             | Disclaimer: These are not the opinions of Claris,
(415) 960-4070           | Apple, the author, or anyone else living or dead.