Re: disk format question

[Warren Young <warren at etr-usa dot com>]

On 1/8/2013 06:59, bartels wrote:
> The windows format.com

format.com hasn't existed since the DOS days.  That includes the 
DOS-based versions of Windows, up through Windows ME.  Under NT-derived 
versions of Windows, "format" is a built-in command in cmd.exe.

> claims the fs is write protected, but I hope dd
> can help out.

It's worth a try, but if I had to take a blind bet on it, I'd say you're 
going to find that dd will give the same result.  Cygwin is essentially 
a user-level process.  If cmd.exe cannot do a thing, dd.exe probably 
can't, either.

It is *possible* that unmounting the filesystem with the taskbar button 
will let you write to the raw device.  But Windows being Windows, it's 
possible that will make it disappear from the system entirely, too.

> The mtab is not very helpful:

That's because Cygwin proper does not mount local filesystems.  The 
Cygwin mount table just shows you Cygwin-specific mappings that it has 
added on top of what the underlying NT kernel has done.

In this case...

>   D: /cygdrive/d udf binary,posix=0,user,noumount,auto 1 1

...it is showing you the /cygdrive/d alias Cygwin has provided for you.

> My question is this: which device in /dev do I use?

According to [this][1] it's probably /dev/sdb.  But please do read 
through what I pointed you to first, and check its applicability 
carefully before attempting this.

[1] 
http://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/using-specialnames.html#pathnames-posixdevices

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