Thread View: comp.protocols.ibm
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Started by Lon Stowell
Mon, 20 May 1991 19:51
Re: hard disk write protect
Author: Lon Stowell
Date: Mon, 20 May 1991 19:51
Date: Mon, 20 May 1991 19:51
22 lines
1549 bytes
1549 bytes
Some older systems had hardware write protect to prevent accidental corruption of boot and load image files. These had address switches....the hard drive was write protected from 0,0,0 up through the address set in the switches. A separate switch enabled the protection...allowing updates when in the defeat position. You may need to prevent both write and erase current....the implementations I am familiar with actually performed the write protect in the disk controller...by inhibiting the Write Enable signal...which inhibited ALL write procedures for protected addresses. A failure in the disk write circuitry could destroy data, but the purpose of Write Protect was to protect the hardware from software...not hardware faults. If you were to implement it today, you could provide write inhibit for a range of addresses...using software to load these. You could then set an "expert" flag instruction in software to prevent ordinary mortals...such as root...from overwriting the data. '
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