[ale] fd0 write protected

[John M. Mills]

gm Hey folks, I sometimes make the stupid mistake of trying to write to a
gm write protected floppy.  Problem is, once I correct this oversight, I still
gm can't write to the disk.  In fact, I am unable to write to any floppy in this
gm drive without rebooting.  The permissions are okay.  Anyone else run into
gm this problem?

I don't experience this.  I just did the following:
1) placed write-protected diskette in fd1
2) mounted the disk on /dos_b or /lin_b -- and got "write
   protected" message (and Linux correctly determined the
   diskette sizes)
3) attempted to copy a file to that diskette, and was
   refused:
   cp: cannot create regular file `/dos_b/test_file': Read-only file system
4) umounted the diskette and moved write-protect tab to 'unprotect'
5) mounted the diskette, copied the file successfully, deleted the
   file, and umounted the diskette.
This worked with DD and HD, mosdos and ext2 file systems: no lockups.
Warnings and activity of write-protection look OK to me.  I did _not_ try
to override write-protection as 'su' - was that in your scenario?

Attached is the relevant section of my /etc/fstab:
/dev/fd0         /dos_a       msdos       user,noauto,rw
/dev/fd0         /lin_a       ext2        user,noauto,rw
/dev/fd1         /dos_b       msdos       user,noauto,rw
/dev/fd1         /lin_b       ext2        user,noauto,rw

Ahdunno ...

John M. Mills, Senior Research Engineer   --   john.m.mills at gtri.gatech.edu
   Georgia Tech Research Institute, Georgia Tech, Atlanta, GA 30332-0853
        Phone contacts: 770.528.3258 (voice), 770.528.7083 (FAX)
          "Lies, damned lies, statistics, and simulations."