SD Cards
Write Protection
The card itself does not respect the write switch. It is up to the job of the reader to let the OS to know if the card is set to locked or unlocked:
http://www.camerahacker.com/Forums/DisplayComments.php?file=Storage/memory_card_locked.html
- Quote: The solution to my problem had to do with the card locked sensor mechanism in the SD card slot. For my camera (Canon SD600), it has a spring sensor (on the left wall of the SD Slot) that detects the whether the SD card lever is set to locked or unlocked. If the SD Card is set to locked, the position of the SD Card lever presses against the sensor mechanism and pushes it in, and when the SD card is set to unlocked, the mechanism is allowed to stick out.
It is built into the Linux kernel and most likely win driver/kernel:
At my work, we use SD cards in an embedded system. If we try to boot up with a card that is locked, we'll get a kernel panic. This wasn't a big deal until we got a batch of SD cards that had very loose write switches: the act of inserting the card into the reader was sometimes enough to move the switch and lock the card. A lot of people started trying to come up with mechanical options to prevent this, like sticking a piece of tape on each SD card, but in the end we fixed this by changing one line of source code in the Linux kernel. Now when an SD card is detected with the switch set to read-only, we simply ignore the switch and happily write data to the card whenever we want to.
This is from our crazy mismash of backports so I doubt this patch would apply cleanly anywhere, but if you want to experiment with your own kernel, this is a good starting point:
--- include/linux/mmc/card.h (revision 1423)
+++ include/linux/mmc/card.h (revision 1424)
@@ -125,7 +125,7 @@
#define mmc_card_blockaddr(c) ((c)->state & MMC_STATE_BLOCKADDR)
#define mmc_card_set_present(c) ((c)->state |= MMC_STATE_PRESENT)
-#define mmc_card_set_readonly(c) ((c)->state |= MMC_STATE_READONLY)
+#define mmc_card_set_readonly(c) {printk("Ignoring MMC read-only switch\n");}
#define mmc_card_set_highspeed(c) ((c)->state |= MMC_STATE_HIGHSPEED)
#define mmc_card_set_blockaddr(c) ((c)->state |= MMC_STATE_BLOCKADDR)
If you don't feel like patching and building a Linux kernel but you do have a Canon P&S camera, you can use CHDK to write files (pictures) to a write-protected SD card (when the camera turns on, the OF checks the state of the switch; when set to RO it will auto-load firmware from the SD card. This allows users to boot directly into CHDK; then CHDK ignores the state of the switch so it can still write pictures to the card; see e.g. http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/Bootable_SD_card
