Spontaneous write proctection on thumb drive(s)

[qyron]

I've been having a series of problems when using thumb drives on my system, as of lately, with the thumb drives spontaneously locking access to write. The system will simply return a message that the drive in question is protected; it allows for read access, nonetheless. Because my system box is getting old, I wrote this off for faulty USB ports but I was surprised when this same behaviour repeated itself today on a different computer, with a freshly formatted drive. Again, during a file transfer, the system interrupted the operation and returned a similar message, stating the medium is write protected.

The first time I had this situation was with a 128GB thumb drive that overheated (it felt hot to the touch, when compared with other drives) when in use, so I was quick to assume the drive itself was faulty and started suspecting the ports on my machine. Strangely enough, under Windows it never locked and after some reading I was further suspicious about the file system it used not being very well supported under Linux systems, so I stopped using it at all. Later on, at random, any drive I use on my system will simply lock.

The only ways I've found to correct this behaviour is either by fully formatting the drive or, under Windows, use the automated tool to look up for errors. All tests I've run on all drives that returned this error return no problems with the drives itself, be it done under Debian or Windows. When plugging in the drives to a Win box the system will identify corruption errors and fix it but it will not unlock the key for later access on Debian, although the drives become functional under that system.

Today, when performing a data backup on an old machine, using a drive that had returned this problem in the past but had been fully functional, the system stopped the copy operation and returned the warning message. It is an old system, with only first generation USB ports, still running a very out of date WinXP. The thumb drive I was using is a 32GB standard thumb drive, formatted for FAT32, this morning.

Can someone share some insight on this situation? All my searches return solutions to actively lock thumb drives or USB ports, which is not my exact need nor problem at the moment.

Thanks in advance.

[cronoik]

Please post the output of dmesg when the error occurs or you can also post the contents of /var/log/messages for the most recent error. I think you should be able to find a line like "Remounting filesystem read-only" in the log file.

[qyron]

I'll do so when I get another thumb drive doing the same thing. To eliminate the chance of faulty hardware I'm migrating my system to a new box.