The good news is that there are some methods you can try to see if you can finally get rid of it. Some of the tips you can try are so easy you won’t believe it.
How to Eliminate the Write Protection on a USB Drive
Before you get into anything that involves your computer’s settings, let’s go over some basic tips. There are some USB flash drives that feature a small switch and lever that allow you to make the USB write-only or both read and write. Go ahead and look carefully and see if you can find that switch. Be careful that you don’t push too hard since it requires almost no effort at all. If you didn’t find a switch, you can try to see if the regedit method works. Click on the search icon and type regedit, and the option will appear in the search results automatically. When the Registry Editor appears, look for the “ComputerHKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlStorageDevicePolicies” option. Go ahead and double-click on the “WriteProtect” value. It should be located in the right pane.
In the Value data box, you’ll need to change the one to a zero, and don’t forget to click OK to save your changes. Go ahead and close everything and reboot your computer. If your Windows computer is missing this option, not to worry since it’s easy to create it. In the Control Folder right-click on the white space. Select “New -> Key” and name your new creation “StorageDevicePolicies.”
Once the key is visible, double-click on it, and you should be able to see a folder. Just like you did before, right-click in the white space, but this time pick “New -> DWORD.” This time, name it WriteProtect and change the value to zero. Select zero and click OK. Once you’ve left the registry, you’ll need to reboot your computer.
The Command Prompt Method
If the first method didn’t work, hopefully the one with the command prompt will remove that write protection. You’ll need to run the cmd.exe, but if you’re unable to, then you’re going to need to use the command prompt as an administrator.
To do that, right-click on the Start menu and choose the “Run as administrator” option. When the command prompt is open, enter these commands, but make sure you press Enter after each one of them. Do note that you need to replace the “X” in the select disk x command, where “x” is the number of your non-working drive. Also, you can swap “fat32” for “ntfs” if you only need to use the drive with Windows computers.
Conclusion
Write protect is obviously meant to do what the name states, but there are times when you wish it wouldn’t do that. These methods should help you finally be able to transfer those much-needed files. Do you have a technique that I missed? Share it with us in the comments. This article was first published in December 2009 and was updated in April 2018.
