Recent changes to 14: Prevent writing to usb hard drives

#14 Prevent writing to usb hard drives

Tobin Davis — Tue, 12 Mar 2019 07:10:48 -0000

Ok I just wrote 16gib SD image on my 1 terabyte HDD having all my personal backups etc. Thank you XOXO.

#14 Prevent writing to usb hard drives

Jeff B — Mon, 13 Aug 2018 09:01:24 -0000

PS I can see how people can make this mistake, as if there's any kind of error on write DI will change the destination drive letter. If you're not paying attention you could easily overwrite the wrong device when you try again.

#14 Prevent writing to usb hard drives

Jeff B — Mon, 13 Aug 2018 08:59:53 -0000

why not just have a warning on write saying this is a large device are you sure you want to overwrite it? This warning would activate above the 250gb limit or whatever you think is appropriate.

Doing it this way would keep everyone happy as those who genuinely want to image something that big will still be able to.

#14 Prevent writing to usb hard drives

Jeff B — Wed, 16 May 2018 20:41:37 -0000

I cannot upvote this enough. I just had a behavior that caused me to have to spin up SuperScan in Active File Recovery Pro because even though I selected the media to write a linux image to once I actually selected the .img file for some stupid reason the drive tree refreshed. I was in need of writing to the N drive which is the microSD card however when it refreshed it detected my M drive at the top of the tree and selected that. A 1TB drive full of data! I have a dozen drives on this machine so having the ability to see the drive size especially as a secondary sanity check would be wonderful. I personally can't fathom why someone wouldn't want to have the drive size or hell even the nomclature shown in the lilst for tracking purposes? To me the GUI should have a wizard of sorts that would show you something similar to like what you see for example in backup software or file recovery like the attached image.

#14 Prevent writing to usb hard drives

Jeff B — Sun, 29 Apr 2018 19:19:13 -0000

Thank you in advance :-) Btw, Libreelec's image burner application doesn't allow me to write on my external usb hdd. Ethcer would allow, but at least it gives me more informaton about the destionation (like: capacity and name).

#14 Prevent writing to usb hard drives

Tobin Davis — Sat, 28 Apr 2018 00:46:47 -0000

assigned_to: Tobin Davis

#14 Prevent writing to usb hard drives

Jeff B — Tue, 17 Apr 2018 03:01:40 -0000

Please refer to other software
https://www.osforensics.com/tools/write-usb-images.html
http://www.alexpage.de/usb-image-tool/

#14 Prevent writing to usb hard drives

Jeff B — Sat, 11 Mar 2017 08:49:10 -0000

Unfortunately my 6Tb WD MyBook is still shown in the list in 1.0.0. As for what happens if somebody tries to write on it: the program wipes everything from the hard drive. I know it, because I did it once by accident. Fortunately I could bring most of my data back that time.

#14 Prevent writing to usb hard drives

Tobin Davis — Fri, 02 Dec 2016 17:48:54 -0000

I will look into this with the next release (coming soon). Jeff is right, the code is there to check, but it may have been put in post-v.0.9.5 release. There are a lot of other enhancements that have gone in as well, like the ability to detect USB Floppy now. Part of the problem is that the Windows API's are very scattered. There isn't a single query that gives the programmer all of the information of a device, it requires multiple IOCTL calls and reading of nested structures returned from those calls. Some calls won't work for some devices, others only work on specific devices (one call will return one enum of fixed, removable, or ~20 different floppy formats)..

Add to all of this that my primary work and focus is Linux based (I'm a Linux programmer developing a Windows app - what could go wrong?) and you get a better sense of the complexity.

#14 Prevent writing to usb hard drives

Jeff B — Fri, 20 May 2016 15:32:52 -0000

Appreciate the input - sounds like something in the condition isn't working if your device is showing. Nothing 2TB should appear, as far as I can recall. Something to look into. Thanks.