a little help mounting a read-only drive

[cornercuttin]

i am trying to perform an acquistion of a hard drive, but i am using a write blocker to acquire the drive forensically (digital intelligence Ultrablock IDE).

does anyone here have experience in mounting a write-blocked drive in knoppix. i have tried helix and the auditors boot disk, and i am getting the same errors.

the write blocker basically turns the hard drive into a write blocked usb drive. when i plug in the usb drive, here is what dmesg tells me (and this is shortened because i am writing this thread from a different machine):

Attached scsi disk sda at scsi4, chan 0, id 0, lun 0
Attached scsi generic sd0, chan 0, id 0, lun 0, type 0
... blah blah...
usb 4-4: reset high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 17
usb 4-4: scsi_eh_4 timed out on ep0in
usb 4-4: device descriptor read/64, error -110
usb 4-4: scsi_eh_4 timed out on ep0in
usb 4-4: device descriptor read/64, error -110
usb 4-4: reset high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 17
usb 4-4: scsi_eh_4 timed out on ep0in
usb 4-4: device descriptor read/64, error -110
usb 4-4: scsi_eh_4 timed out on ep0in
usb 4-4: device descriptor read/64, error -110
usb-storage: usb_reset_device returns -19
scsi: Device offlined - not ready after error recovery: host 4 channel 0 id 0 lun 0
usb 4-4: USB disconnect, address 17
usb-storage: storage_disconnect() called
usb-storage: usb_stor_stop_transfer called
scsi4 (0:0): rejecting I/O to offline device

and basically that sums it up. i check fstab, and the drive aint in there. i figure of all things, linux would be able to handle read only devices, but maybe not.

anyone know of anything. i would appreciate it. is there any well to tell the machine to expect a read only device?

thanks in advance

[bravobritto]

I'd suggest you take a look at this http://www.bombich.com/mactips/openfirmware.html page and the linked pages on it. Together it makes for a good explanation and user guide to Open Firmware and it includes info on boot devices.