How to Remove Write Protection from USB Drive | 4 Best Solution How to Fix

Not so long ago we used handbags (and cases) for disks, a special “cloth” to wipe them from dust and fingerprints, this is nothing to compare with the incomparable smell of a plastic box from a newly purchased disk, the sound of opening a drive ...

With the advent of affordable flash drives, disks faded into the background, but now there are none at all. Currently, an active computer user can’t do without a couple of flash drives in his pocket, even taking into account the high growth rates of cloud storage services.

Considering the topic of modern problems with usb-drives and sd-cards, it is simply impossible not to recall the user experience of past years.

So, in the framework of this article we will talk about an extremely unpleasant situation that absolutely any holder of data storage media may face - about blocking their recording and formatting.

What can be the causes of the problem, and most importantly, what are the ways to solve it. You can find answers to these and other questions further.

Causes

Do you know what the main complexity of the error in question is? The fact that there may actually be no causal relationship.

The flash drive may be new or "used by millions of rewriting cycles." An error of the form "Disk is write protected. Unprotect or use another drive," namely, the operating system usually comes up with such messages, it can wait for anyone at every step. At the same time, reading the contents of the medium is available in normal mode and is carried out without any difficulties.

Based on this, and also taking into account the relative simplicity of this device, two root causes can be distinguished:

1. This is a hardware failure. That is, the write error was caused by a physical factor, for example, breakage, deformation, or the flash drive simply burned out. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of options that could lead to this. In addition, in this situation, it is not necessary to exclude the incorrect operation of the usb port of the computer motherboard with the carrier.
2. This is, accordingly, a software failure. It is characterized as well as the first option. Software malfunctions can be on the side of the device itself, or on the side of the operating system.

Unfortunately, there are not as many solutions as we would like in this situation, and all of them cannot guarantee that the device’s performance will be restored.

Therefore, before proceeding, you should prepare a little:

1. When accessing information that is on a usb-drive or on an sd-card, make sure that in the case of the most unfavorable developments, it will not be lost.
2. Create a recovery point on the computer, as one of the options below implies certain changes in the registry of the operating system, which should always be approached with some caution.

Solutions

You should start with a rather ordinary situation, which is related to the fact that the target storage medium has a mechanical switch external to the case, which is responsible for locking and unlocking operations for recording / deleting and formatting its contents.

This switch may look different, and sometimes it can be located on the side, and you can activate it by accident. Therefore, carefully inspect the device, perhaps a similar development is relevant in your case. 

If protection is disabled or your device does not have such a switch, proceed as follows:

Solution 1 - specialized software from the device manufacturer

Almost every manufacturer of information storage devices produces special utilities that are designed to solve possible problems in the operation of their products.

For example, the four leaders of this market are:

• «Transcend» this is “JetFlash Recovery”, available for free download on the manufacturer’s official resource;
• «Kingston» this is «Kingston Format Utility»
• «Adata» this is «USB Flash Drive Online Recovery»
• «Silicon Power» this is «USB Flash Drive Recovery»

It should be understood that such software can only work with certain flash drives, and it will be problematic (and useless) to use the software from "Transcend" with "Kingston" or vice versa.

This does not apply to third-party developers that release universal utilities that use certain types of controllers in their work (for example, some programs for implementing low-level formatting). But their use should be accompanied by certain skills, since they require a more serious intervention in the structure of the information storage device.

For "native software" everything is simple - it is to download (and install if necessary) and step by step follow the recommendations of the program.

Solution 2 - Checking Registry Entries on a Computer

Previously, this method has already been announced, and it is for its implementation that you should take care in advance of creating a recovery point. Since careless work with the registry editor can lead to unstable operation of the operating system.

So, you need to do the following:

• Press “WIN + R” to open the “Run” window and enter the command “regedit”; 

  

• A registry editor window will open where you need to find the “StorageDevicePolicies” folder, which is located in the following path - «HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control»;
• If this item is not available, then right-click on the “Control” directory and select “New” - “Key”.

  

  Set the partition name “StorageDevicePolicies”, and create a “DWORD Parameter” or “QWORD”, depending on the bit depth of your operating system.

  

• Name it “WriteProtect” and leave the value “0” set to the default.

  

  For those who have this section, you only need to make sure that the “WriteProtect” parameter is set to “0”.

• Further, it remains only to remove the media and restart the computer.

Solution 3 - Using Command Line Functionality

• Press “WIN + S” and enter “cmd” in the search box;
• Right-click on the result and select "Run as administrator";

  

• In the command line console that opens, enter and execute the “diskpart” command to launch the utility for working with disks;

  

• Next, run “list disk” to display all mapped drives;

  

  While looking at the resulting table, pay attention to the “Size” column and determine by the exclusion method which digit is assigned to the target flash drive.

• Enter and execute “select disk +”, where instead of the plus, specify the disk number from the step above;

  

• Run the “attributes disk clear readonly” command to reset the read-only attribute;

  

• Finally, execute “Exit” and close the command line console.

Further manipulations with the media depend on your goals (formatting, transferring information, recording).

Solution 4 - View Local Group Policy Editor Settings

• Press "WIN + R" with the command "gpedit.msc";

  

• Open the section "Computer Configuration - Administrative Templates";
• Go to the "System" directory and find the "Removable Storage Access" subsection;

  

• Among the list that opens, find "Removable drives: Forbid reading" and open it with a double click;
• Set it to Not Configured or Disabled.

  

All that remains is to save the changes and restart the computer.

Conclusion

Of the workable options that have been helping users out for more than a year, unfortunately, there is nothing more to add. The only thing worth noting is that after gaining access to the functionality of recording information on the media, check it for the presence of virus activity, as well as the standard utility “CHKDSK”. And it is better to additionally test its work with specialized software such as Victoria.