Button and key event to toggle RO/RW all Hard-Drives automatically

[Leandro Jardim]

I was visiting http://www.amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?t=70346, and reading about a hard-drive infected with virus from TOSEC, and thought about the feature like the thread title says, the aim is to protect the harddrives while they are not being used from viruses loaded from bootblocks or from programs loaded from floppies.

Looks like an important feature for Amiga hard-drive users. Would be more interesting if would be possible to add a checkbox in Misc section to automatically toggle RO all hard-drives when the Amiga is booted with a floppy in DF0.

[Toni Wilen]

First: no, it isn't important feature. No one should boot from suspicious floppy disks if harddrives are enabled. Real or emulated.

Second: "volume x is write protected" errors can appear quite quickly and I can guarantee someone will think "VIRUS!" when it is some application trying to flush log buffers etc.. Write protection hardfiles can be even more dangerous if filesystem has data in buffer when write protection gets enabled. Fortunately it is not my problem

Finally: Misc panel option can be done.

[Vot]

Originally Posted by Toni Wilen

First: no, it isn't important feature. No one should boot from suspicious floppy disks if harddrives are enabled. Real or emulated.

Second: "volume x is write protected" errors can appear quite quickly and I can guarantee someone will think "VIRUS!" when it is some application trying to flush log buffers etc.. Write protection hardfiles can be even more dangerous if filesystem has data in buffer when write protection gets enabled. Fortunately it is not my problem

Finally: Misc panel option can be done.

Shiesh i must be a weirdo. On the odd occasion i need to boot up something dodgy i just make a backup of the hard disk file on the host first them restore it when I'm done.

[Leandro Jardim]

Originally Posted by Toni Wilen

First: no, it isn't important feature. No one should boot from suspicious floppy disks if harddrives are enabled. Real or emulated.

I only think it is tough to separate suspicious floppy disks and good ones when it comes from TOSEC or even EAB. But the important thing is that I see your point. If this is the case I can use a separate config, floppy only or maybe with a super-minimal HD, to be able to restore the data quickly when something goes wrong.

Originally Posted by Toni Wilen

Write protection hardfiles can be even more dangerous if filesystem has data in buffer when write protection gets enabled. Fortunately it is not my problem

I really didnt thought of that. Yes it is very dangerous to enable write protection when AmigaOS is writting to HD. Ugh.

Originally Posted by Toni Wilen

Finally: Misc panel option can be done.

Nice. If this is a yes and someday you get time to implement it, then please do it, I feel lack of this type of feature on AmigaOS and even on Windows I miss it, for example.

EDIT: I replaced "lose" for "miss".

[Aegis]

Amiga Forever has an 'undo' feature for drives that allows you to revert any changes made to a disk - it's actually just copying the .hdf to a temp file and running that instead of the original but it's handy for testing stuff out without making a mess of your system.

[Leandro Jardim]

Originally Posted by Aegis

Amiga Forever has an 'undo' feature for drives that allows you to revert any changes made to a disk - it's actually just copying the .hdf to a temp file and running that instead of the original but it's handy for testing stuff out without making a mess of your system.

This is a very smart way to work with HDFs! Maybe Toni can implement that directly on WinUAE? The 68k Macintosh emulator "Basilisk II" have that same feature, too.

But it may not work with large HDFs, like 10 GB ones. Unless that the changes to the HDF were done in memory or in a separate file, and if later when the user quit from WinUAE it ask if should save the contents back to the hard disk.

WinUAE cant simply copy a 10 GB HDF to temp directory, it is possible but would take much time! The correct way would be to generate a sparse file with the new, modified contents of the HDF and at the end merge the contents of both HDFs. Or WinUAE could read both the HDF and the sparse file at the beginning when required.