How To Fix Write Protect Errors on USB drives

A few days ago I wrote on How to write protect a USB drive which helps you secure you documents by restricting users from coping files from your computer to their drives .

But sometimes you may encounter a problem either on your drive or a friend’s one that whenever you plug a drive and try to access its files window pops up a message error saying the disk is write protected . This could be due to many reasons . Some of them

  • The drive has a swith which enables write protect
  • Drive is write protected and moving or copying data is restricted
  • A virus has attacked your drive and tweaks the regestry file whenever you plug it .
     Etc..
                               

Here are some of tips and options that might work out your problem :

1 . Check If the drive has a Switch 

Some drives comes with a switch that can be used to lock a device { aka write protect } which prevents modifying or deleting the drive contents .
Read the manual that comes with the drive or examine the Disk for any switch and Flip it to enable  read 
write mode . 

      

2 . Using Command Prompt

Step 1 : 

-- Plug in the drive and take a note of the drive letter

-- Type cmd on the search box . right click cmd and run as administrator

-- Type Diskpart and Click Enter

-- Type Listdisk and Click Enter

-- The above command will display a list of all current drives on your computer .

      Disk 0 should be the whole computers harddrive even if it is partitioned
      Next Disk # should be any disks connected like USB sticks, SD cards etc

    Then Type select disk 1
Note : 1 should be your disk if its the only one current connected

-- Then type attrib disk clear readonly

Step 2 : Format your disk 

On the command Prompt type below code to format the drive

Format H:

Note : I assumed H is my drive letter you can change it to your drive letter

If the above commands works . the write protected mode should now be disabled.

3 . Manual Configure Windows Registry key :

   • Go to Start and type regedit on the search box and click ok to open Registry Editor

   • Navigate to the below path

  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrrentControlSet\Control\StorageDevicePolicies 
 
      Or If you cant see the above key navigate to the below path

  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrrentControlSet\Control\

     Then select a New Key and name it StorageDevicePolicies
      The path should now look like this below

  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrrentControlSet\Control\StorageDevicePolicies

  • Click on the new StorageDevicePolicies key and on the right pad right click and add a New ..
    Name it WriteProtect



  • Then Double Click on it and set its Value to 0 to disable writing.
                            
         Reboot the Computer and Try access the Drive


They are tools that can help Execute the low level Format like HDD LLF Tool .  This tool is said to be working great and might help you getting ride the write protect mode .

If you have tried all of the above methods and still no luck then your problem might be a hardware issue .  Broken circuits and other hardware issues might sometimes cause write protect mode . Try contact the device vendor for a solution .