Not long ago, my girlfriend copied files to a USB stick (we'll call this stick #1), but absentmindedly pulled it while it was being written to (this is on her computer, btw, using ubuntu 11.10). Naturally I plugged it back in to check the damage and found the drive was stuck in read only mode. The first remedy I tried was a reboot; that didn't change anything. I tried to see if I could change it back to read/write under properties. That didn't work. I tried fscking it; nothing. Since it's a FAT32 partition, I tried dosfsck as well, and when that didn't help I resorted to gparted to repartition and format, and it couldn't do that either. At this point I thought maybe the stick was buggered, so I tried another one (stick #2) and that was stuck in read only as well (and nothing traumatic had occurred to that stick). I figured maybe the USB port was locked in a write state (despite the reboot), but according to fuser, there was nothing accessing the port. I decided to kill all processes to that port regardless and reboot; still nothing.
Enter stick #3 (this one's mine). For some reason, my device was read/writable, yet sticks #1 & #2 were still read only after swapping them out. That to me is just weird. Any clues?
Also should point out that none of the above mentioned sticks have a physical write protect switch.
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