Write Protecting Jaz Disks

Jaz drives can write protect Jaz disks, making them read-only so that the disks cannot be erased, formatted, or overwritten without explicitly being write-enabled by someone. This is a wise and useful precaution for both the ISS workstation data disks and the profiler data disks.

Write protecting a Jaz disk can be done with Iomega's Jaz Tools software, but the Jaz tools need to be installed on one of the Windows machines. Find the Jaz drive either through the Windows Explorer or by opening the My Computer icon. Right click on the Jaz drive entry. If the Jaz Tools have been installed on the machine, there should be several menu entries related to the Jaz drive, including an entry to Eject the disk and a Protect... entry. If the Jaz Tools have not been installed, either forego write protecting the Jaz disks or find the Jaz Tools CD-ROM and install the tools. If the tools are installed and the Jaz menu entries are present, choose the Protect... entry from the right-click menu. Note that the Protect... option will be disabled (dimmed) if no disk has been detected in the drive yet. The Protect... menu entry opens up a window with several protection options, each with its own button. Click on the Write Protect button, then click OK to effect the change. The password field should be left blank, meaning no password will be required to disable the write protection. The disk should now be write protected and read-only.

If write protection ever needs to be removed from a disk, follow the same steps as above to open the protection window, then click on the Remove Protection button and click OK.