heres what i did i took 2 harddrives of similar size and raid 0 them. just to keep linux & windows i partition them in fat32, so now its all fine and linux is killing the kernal. then i proceed to window to copy some stuff over. to my dismay i get the friendly windose message explaining vary narrowly to me that my drive has just been write protected. i then reboot into Gentoo to find out that, guess what (its write protected oh yippy) so my question is this is the drive controller playing piss on me day or is the sinister penguin out to get me.
I had the same issue in Windows 7, it turned out to be the drivers for the RAID controler itself. I fixed it temporarely by installing an older driver, and then fixed it permanently with the new driver when it came out. You also might need to flash your bios or RAID controler to the latest firmware.
its not the controller i just flashed that. when i took a look at the HDD controller status, with HDD info it said the drives internal lock mechanism was activated. my question is there a command or software to unlock it.
Try that gentoo.. as root run hdparm only other way I know to unlock a now locked hdd is with the manufacturers tools for such jobs.. they can be found but 100% data loss is expected.
Isn't it funny that the last thing you think of is exacly what the problem stated (unable to write to media) Then again, a good raid adapter (even software raid) would let you write to it even with a failed drive.
The drive locked itself and then failed, maybe an internal trigger flipped the drives write protection to on, to allow me to read the data off of it before it failed.