Fixing Read-Only USB Drives

I recently purchased some inexpensive 4GB USB drives from Amazon and right away, I ran into problems. Mageia Linux essentially mandates that you use their utility, IsoDumper, to write ISO images to USB drives. A nice feature is that if any space is left on the drive, it can format it in one of several different formats compatible with whatever OS the ISO is. For example, I installed the FreeDOS ISO and formatted the remainder of the drive as a FAT partition, perfect for including some DOS apps.

However, if the ISO image is installed and is corrupted, the drive becomes "read only" and can't be overwritten on a second attempt with IsoDumper.

Unfortunately, because the USB's partition table seems borked, you can't just use:
$ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=4096 count=1

to zero out the partition table because it returns the error message that /dev/sdX is "read-only".

I had an unused drive , so I imaged it with:
$ sudo dd if=/dev/sdX of=4MB_USB.img

You do need to know where your USB drive is mounted so you don't screw up a valuable partition.

Fortunately, Mageia will automount that "extra" partition and if you let it, while the borked drive is mounted you can then:

$sudo dd if=4MB_USB.img of=/dev/sdX

and, as if by magic, your USB drive is "restored".

Comments

DOS4GW.EXE Version 2.01a and Alternative DOS Extenders

DOS4GW.EXE The Tenberry DOS extender DOS4GW.EXE was used by many early DOS games. I still enjoy playing many of these games and DOS4GW.EXE is usable with DOSBox , so they can be played on Linux. However, the version of DOS4GW.EXE that was included with the game was whatever was current at the time. The most recent version that includes many bugfixes that possibly affected the games when used with DOSBox have been fixed in the latest version, 2.01a. It's not free at US$49, but you can downloaded it here . Simply substitute it for whatever version of DOS4GW.EXE your game provided and enjoy the bug-fixed goodness. Tenberry also makes a "high-performance" "pro" version of DOS4GW.EXE, but it costs $300. I think that they could sell quite a few of these to hobby users (since, you know, DOS is dead) for US$5. Open Souce to the Rescue There are better performing, free and Open Source alternatives available and worth a look. DPMI Explained Let's unders...

Unpack those .EXE game files from GOG.com (Plus other un-packers)

I just came upon innoextract today. I have many of the wonderful games from GOG.com, some of which have native Linux Clients. Before now, I've had to use PlayOnLinux or Crossover to install these for use with WINE, then add the Linux client. InnoSetup as a way to create an installer to install the games on Windows. Daniel Scharrer has created innoextract to allow the unpacking of those archives on a non-Windows platform. The website provides information on using innoextract , but this information from the page is very useful: GOG.com Installers GOG.com installers with a 2.x.x version number on the download page or in the filename use InnoSetup 5.5.0 and cannot be extracted by innoextract 1.2 and older. Older installers use InnoSetup 5.2.3 and usually have no version in the filename. Some GOG.com multi-part installers with version 2.1.x or higher use RAR archives (renamed to .bin) to store the game data. These files are not part of the InnoSetup installer and require...

Lighttpd and Simple Virtual Hosts Configuration.

I manage some websites for car clubs I belong to. They had been paying for web hosting and had some volunteers who knew not quite enough about maintaining and administrating the sites. Having some prior experience with similar small club sites, I volunteered to host them and admin them. With the first site, the pages were a train wreck of PHP and making even a small change on the existing pages caused the site to crash. Way back around the turn of the last century, I had a few Linux user’s groups that wanted a website, so I worked with Cynthia Manuel of Flamingo Internet Navigators to make a template for a web site that would be easy to maintain and easy to add static content. She developed templates that relied on Server Side Includes (SSI) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to make administration and content additions simple and easy, so I ported all the content over to that template and hosted the site myself. Later, another car club needed the same assistance and I ported it ov...

MaximumHoyt

Search This Blog