There are two reasons you would want to prevent Linux from writing anything to an external harddrive or USB drive when you plug it in:To recover accidentally deleted files from now empty part of the drivesFor digital forensics, you need to be certain nothing on the drive has changed when you make a clone of itThere are drive connectors and external enclosures just for this purpose, and have a switch or button on them which physically blocks any write commands from reaching the drive.However, my USB-to-IDE connector doesn't have that luxury. I have heard this is possible to achieve by software instead (which would include having to disable Ubuntu's auto-mounting), but I'm not finding any instructions online on how to do this.How do I prevent Ubuntu from writing anything to an external harddrive for the purposes of preserving all data on it?In my particular case I will be using Ubuntu, however, I asked on Unix & Linux rather than AskUbuntu in the hope of finding an answer that would work across distributions, and not just in my particular case. Both types of answers are welcome.
How do I prevent Ubuntu from writing ANYTHING to an external harddrive?
linux;mount;readonly