Write protected USB drive

[gmj]

Hello all.

 

Got a problem with a USB drive, I can not write to it or format it due to it being write protected. Tried using disk part to remove it, no joy. Tried a registry edit I found online, no joy.

 

If anyone knows of a way or a tool to remove write protection, I would be very grateful.

 

Thanks,

 

gmj.

[Michael]

On some older USB flash drives there's a small physical tab you can move to make it read only or the reverse.

[gmj]

Hi.

 

Thanks for the reply. Yeah, checked for that, but it does not have one.

[Tesla]

I assume you can read from it? If not maybes it's fubar-ed

[gmj]

Yeah, can read from it ok. Grrr.

[difinity]

Try this.

Open regedit, navigate to Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\StorageDevicePolicies

Double click on WriteDetect and change the value from 1 to 0.

Restart your PC and connect your USB, see if its now not write protected.

[GuyJD]

I had this recently and found that a lot of flash memory manufacturers are building in fail-safes now that if memory degradation surpassed a certain threshold the drive be it SSD or USB Flash it will switch to read only mode to avoid data loss. It's quite a neat little feature but does mean that the drive is pretty much useless from that point on.

[gmj]

Cheers guys. Tried the regedit, but no good. I suspect that maybe the drive has had it.

[difinity]

There is a program called Check Flash 1.16. I sometimes use it to verify the quality of flash drives.

Available from here amongst other places. https://www.raymond.cc/blog/how-to-check-and-test-usb-flash-drive/