lee@TIS.COM (Theodore Lee) (02/13/89)
Two questions came to mind while I was noting the flood of new hard drive products now available -- a) is there any way of turning off any of the internal drives that are now on the market? (I can't think physically of any clean way of doing it since unlike the IBM boxes the apple case has no openings to the inside from the outside.) b) you'd think it would be pretty straight-forward to build a little interface gadget between a SCSI drive and the cable that would allow you to electrically disable write commands to a particular device (I have never looked at the SCSI protocol so maybe it isn't that easy, but it should be possible.) Anyone know if anyone has such a thing? (I agree with others who have commented on the absence of any write-enable switch on hard drives, although somehow I vaguely remember in some distant past reading about some kind of storage media where you could lock out writes to particular regions of the device; it may have been a mainframe disk or drum, however.)
labc-3dc@e260-3b.berkeley.edu (Andy McFadden) (02/13/89)
In article <8902121946.AA06399@TIS.COM> lee@TIS.COM (Theodore Lee) writes: >Two questions came to mind while I was noting the flood of new >hard drive products now available -- > >a) is there any way of turning off any of the internal drives that are >now on the market? [...] This is becoming increasingly important as viruses spread... obviously on the GS you can kill it from the control panel (although an intelligent virus can turn it back on...), but the //e does create difficulties. It may be possible to wire something into the interface slot (hold a certain line low, etc.), but this sounds a little dangerous. Note that it *is* possible to disallow write access to a ProDOS file (incl subdirectories; not sure about volumes). Check out the change permissions command in Davex (mine is aliased to chmod; not sure what it should be...) -- labc-3dc@widow.berkeley.edu (Andy McFadden)
shawn@pnet51.cts.com (Shawn Stanley) (02/14/89)
lee@TIS.COM (Theodore Lee) writes: >(I agree with others who have commented on the absence of any >write-enable switch on hard drives, although somehow I vaguely >remember in some distant past reading about some kind of storage >media where you could lock out writes to particular regions of >the device; it may have been a mainframe disk or drum, however.) The old Radio Shack hard drives had write-protect buttons on them. I liked that feature a lot... UUCP: {uunet!rosevax, amdahl!bungia, chinet, killer}!orbit!pnet51!shawn INET: shawn@pnet51.cts.com
bsherm@umbio.MIAMI.EDU (Bob Sherman) (02/14/89)
in article <8902121946.AA06399@TIS.COM>, lee@TIS.COM (Theodore Lee) says: > > a) is there any way of turning off any of the internal drives that are > now on the market? (I can't think physically of any clean way of doing > it since unlike the IBM boxes the apple case has no openings to the > inside from the outside.) > There is a DA available for the GS written by Glen E Bredon that will write protect ALL devices at the same time. This included the RAM5 as well as hard drives etc. I don't know all where it is available, but I do know it is in the download section of Miami's Big Apple. -- Internet -- bsherm%umbio@umigw.miami.edu UUCP -- {uunet!gould}!umbio!bsherm Miami's Big Apple 305-948-8000 1200 baud 24 hours 8 years online
blochowi@cat28.CS.WISC.EDU (Jason Blochowiak) (02/15/89)
I know nothing about the internal drives, and even less about hardware. However: It might be possible to write-disable partitions on an Apple SCSI card. Keith: Would it be ok to modify a DIBTAB so that the w field in the device status byte would show that the drive cannot be written to? Or, for that matter, would it be possible to set the online bit to show that the device isn't even online? If this would work, would it work in future revisions? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Jason Blochowiak (blochowi@garfield.cs.wisc.edu) "Not your average iconoclast..." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------