24/09/2013
Remove write-protection from your drive
(admin shiva) How to Remove write-
protection from
your drive Some memory cards and USB
pen drives
have write protection switches, which allows you to prevent files from being
deleted, or any new files being written to
the device. It also prevents the drive or
card from being formatted. Format a USB
drive that is write-
protected Occasionally, you’ll find that a USB flash
drive will refuse to format and Windows
will tell you that it is write protected,
even though there is no switch. Here are a
couple of methods you can try
to format the drive and remove the write protection. Bear in mind that there is no
guarantee that they will work for you:
your drive or memory card may be corrupt
or broken and no utility or low-level
formatting tool will make it work again.
The only solution in this case is to buy a new drive. Removing write-protection in
the Registry
using Regedit.exe In any version of
Windows from XP
onwards, run Regedit.exe (searching
regedit will usually show the program at the top of the list). Navigate to the
following key: Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_
MACHINE
\SYSTEM\ CurrentControlSet\Control
\StorageDevicePolicies Double-click on the
WriteProtect value in the right-hand pane of Regedit.exe.
Change the Value data from 1 to 0 and
click OK to save the change. Close
Regedit and restart your computer.
Connect your USB drive again, and you
should find it is no longer write protected. You can now format the drive
as normal by right-clicking on it in My
Computer and choosing Format. If you
can’t find StorageDevicePolicies,
you can try creating a key by right-
clicking in the white space in the Control folder and choosing New -> Key and
carefully entering the name. Now double-
click on the new key (folder)
and right-click once again and choose
New -> DWORD. Name it WriteProtect and
set its value to 0. Click OK, exit Regedit and reboot your computer. If this method
doesn’t work, try the
following: Removing write-protection using
Diskpart With your USB drive plugged in,
launch a
command prompt. Do this by searching for cmd.exe in the Start menu (or Start
screen in Windows . In Windows XP, click Start then Run, and type cmd.exe in
the box. NOTE: you may need to run
Cmd.exe with
administrator privileges if you see an
“access is denied” message. To do that,
right-click on the shortcut and choose Run as administrator. In Windows
8, simply choose Command prompt
(admin). Now, type the following, pressing
Enter
after each command: diskpart list disk
select disk x (where x is the number of your USB flash drive – use the capacity to
work out which one it is) attributes disk
clear readonly clean create partition
primary format fs=fat32 (you can swap
fat32 for
ntfs if you only need to use the drive with Windows computers) exit
