Program or driver to make disk drive read-only in dos?
Does anyone know of a program or driver that can make any disk drive (including boot drive) read-only in dos? I can't seem to find anything online , I have been googling things like "read-only disk driver for dos" , " program for dos that can make disk read only" and others and can't find anything , I believe drivers or program existed , but just can't find anything
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Is this some need a write protect tab won't handle?
It's a dos boot partition on a regular hard drive I need to make read-only, so a write-protect tab doesn't exist for it.
Oh, a hard drive. I have never heard of any way to make a DOS hard drive volume read-only. Of course, you can mark individual file attributes as “read only” but some programs ignore that. Most hard drive hardware does not support a true “read only” mode. Because DOS programs can talk directly to the hardware they can bypass DOS or even BIOS if they know how.
Back in the day, and even today, the best way to give a user true “read only” access to something was through a mapped network share.
You might investigate using larger removable media. By nature CD-ROMs are read only. Some Compact Flash cards can be set as read only. I think Zip disks can be set as read only, but it requires Iomega’s software to change the setting.
Keep in mind that some DOS programs will get confused and fail to run from read-only media.
hmmm, I was told there is a driver or program that can block writes to a dos drive even down to the hardware level. The only thing I know of is there is a IBM driver called shadow.exe that does write redirects to another drive. you set the read-only drive and than the drive letter that gets the writes. The driver works down to the bios level, not sure if down to the disk controller , will have to check when loaded and windows 3.1x is loaded and 32 bit disk access is enabled. I don't need a driver like this since I don't need writes redirected, I just need read-only.
Not at the hardware level. That would have to be baked in to the drive or controller itself. For a fun time, run MAXLLF on an IDE hard drive from inside Windows 95.
In theory there could be some IDE, SATA or SCSI drive firmwares that could set read-only, but I don’t specifically know of any that can, at least not without also setting the drive as “removable” (That is what Compact Flash cards do). That certainly would not be standard.
On an MFM/RLL drive you could probably disconnect the Write Gate wire, but DOS would get confused as it would still think it could successfully write to the drive, when in fact the write will fail.
Some BIOSes can block BIOS writes to boot sectors as part of virus protection. But again, tools like MAXLLF can bypass BIOS. (Hmm... never actually tried that). In theory a BIOS could also block other writes, but again DOS would get confused. I don’t recall that there is even any BIOS level flag that could tell a system that a hard drive is read-only.
In theory there COULD be a loadable DOS driver that sets the logical DOS volume as “read-only”, but that would only take effect after it loads. And still, BIOS writing and hardware writing would bypass both of those.
Of course, keep in mind that most applications designed to run from a hard drive will quietly try to write data, such as settings files, temporary files, swap files, and so on. Windows 95 and later also insist on writing “last access” dates to directory entries even when no file writing is occurring. In practice, tools running from a CD-ROM usually have to create a writeable RAM disk in order to keep the applications happy.
I have figured out how to make a dos partition read-only , This involves putting the drive in a newer computer and using a diskpart command. you can make the drive read-only using the attributes command in diskpart , if I do "attributes disk set readonly" it makes the the disk read-only in windows, If I put the hard drive back into the computer its suppose to be at , and boot dos , its read only , if I try to write to the machine, or delete anything dos throws an "access denied" error. So using diskpart on the hard drive is one way to make it read-only. So there is a flag in the partition table to make it read-only? this means there had to be a utility to have it done directly in DOS.
There are other tools like Partition Wizard and GParted, but from inside DOS there is not that much (At least not to my knowledge)
another thing , using diskpart and than putting hard drive back in original , I found out it doesn't exactly work like I thought it did, it only makes the files that were on there before read-only, and new file added still read and writable , so need to figure something else out.