How to disable Write Protect from USB drive?

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For some reason I cannot add nor remove any files in my USB drive, and Windows says that it is write protected (I have no idea how write protect got enabled on the drive in the first place)

I can read and copy files from the USB drive just fine, but cannot write anything to it

I have seen this, and it says to go to StorageDevicePolicies, but it doesn't exist in my computer

All other USB drives work fine on this computer

Why did it suddenly get write protected, and how can I undo this? Can this be done without messing with the registry or formatting the drive? I don't want to format the drive

OS is Windows 7

user13267

Posted 2017-03-31T11:05:36.873

Reputation: 805

Question was closed 2017-04-01T07:19:33.957

Do you have AV or any Security Suite installed? – bjoster – 2017-03-31T11:12:22.413

@bjoster yes I have anitivirus but I don't think it's causing this issue – user13267 – 2017-03-31T11:54:40.390

Try uninstalling. 7 out of 10 'write protect' effects are caused by AV and/or security stuff. – bjoster – 2017-04-03T12:18:03.430

Answers

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There's a big chance that if it gets write protected out of nowhere that it's dead, usually when flash memory has been overwritten more times than it can handle (which can sometimes be way too fast) then it just becomes read-only, happened to me several times, have only been able to restore it once.
If you feel you've tried everything, it's probably this

Agterbosch

Posted 2017-03-31T11:05:36.873

Reputation: 34

Actually I haven't tried anything yet, hence I'm asking – user13267 – 2017-03-31T11:53:32.600

The only thing I tried was the registry thing I linked to in the question, but the registry entry mentioned in that website doesn't exist in my computer – user13267 – 2017-03-31T11:54:01.790

how did you restore it by the way? Is it possible to do it without formatting the drive? – user13267 – 2017-03-31T11:57:02.830

That would be pretty difficult, unless by any chance you have the write protected switch on? But I think that if it had a switch like that you would've tried it already.. You can also open cmd as admin, then type "diskpart" and press enter, then type "list disk" press enter, and choose the disk that is your usb drive, if that would be disk 2 for example, type "select disk 2" press enter, then with your usb drive selected, type this "attributes disk clear readonly" press enter, if that will say success, but it didn't actually work, your usb flash drive is basically dead, if it does work, good.. – Agterbosch – 2017-04-04T11:19:41.093

Asked: 2017-03-31T11:05:36.873

Viewed: 769 times

Active: 2017-03-31T12:48:22.090