Patent ID: 7685389

Claim:
An apparatus for setting protection states of protected partitions in hard disk drive storage media, the apparatus comprising: a code storage device storing executable code; a processor executing the executable code, the executable code comprising a control module receiving protection state transition commands from a host for a target partition comprising a plurality of Logical Block Address (LBA); a check module verifying a protection state of a plurality of protection states for the target partition, the plurality of protection states comprising an unprotected state that allows the performance of an indefinite number of read/write operations to a first LBA of the target partition; an auto-protected state allowing exactly one write operation to the first LBA; a read-only auto-protected state preventing write, erase, and format commands to the first LBA after the first LBA has been written to once, wherein at least one LBA of the plurality of LBA in the target partition is unwritten to a Write Once Read Many (WORM) protected state preventing write, erase, and format commands to all logical block addresses in the first partition; and a write module writing the protection state of the target partition to a reserved area of the storage media according to a plurality of defined allowable state transitions, the plurality of defined allowable state transitions comprising a transition from the unprotected state to one of the unprotected state for normal read/write operation, the auto-protected state, and the WORM protected state, a transition from the auto-protected state to one of the unprotected state or the read-only auto-protected state, and a transition from the read-only auto-protected state to the WORM protected state when all LBA in the target partition are written.