How To Remove Usb Pen Drive Write Protection

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Hello Navindra,

Thank you for posting your query on Microsoft Community.

Based on the description, it appears that you are facing issues with the flash drive as you are getting an error message "Write- Protected".

Write protection is a feature that can be found on many different types of media. When write protection is turned on, you will be able to view the information on the disk or USB drive, but you will not be able to write or transfer information to it. Write protection is a protective element that will prevent accidental deletion of important data.

I would suggest you to follow the methods given below and check if that helps:

Method 1:
I would suggest you to follow the steps and check if the issue persists.

a. Open 'My computer'.

b. Right click on USB drive and select 'properties' .

c. Uncheck the option ' Read only ' if it is marked.

Note: Click on yes when the option pops up saying "Apply changes to subfolders and files writing to this folder"

d. Click on ' Apply ' and 'Ok'.

e. Try to delete the files.

Method 2: I would also suggest you to follow the steps to edit the registry to disable the write protected error and check if the issue persists.

You can remove write protection from your usb pendrive using the below method:

a. Open start menu and select run. On the runline, type regedit and press e nter . This wil open the registry editor .
b. Navigate to the following path:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\StorageDevicePolicies
Note:

If the registry key StorageDevicePolicies does not exist, you will need to create it manually.
c. Double click the key WriteProtect in the right window and set the value to 0 in the Value
Data Box and press OK button
d. Restart your computer and try deleting the files from USB flash drives.

Note: Important this section, method, or task contains steps that tell you how to modify the registry. However, serious problems might occur if you modify the registry incorrectly. Therefore, make sure that you follow these steps carefully. For added protection, back up the registry before you modify it. Then, you can restore the registry if a problem occurs. For more information about how to back up and restore the registry, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

For more information about how to back up and restore the registry, follow the steps as in the article:

Back up the registry

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/Back-up-the-registry

Hope this information is helpful. Please do let us know if you need further assistance with Windows.

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Click on your Start Menu and type cmd in the Search for programs and files field. It should show up at the top of your Start menu. Right-click on it and select Run as Administrator. You should now see the Command Line Utility, which looks like the following.

Type in the command DISKPART and hit Enter. Diskpart is a disk-partitioning tool that is built into Windows and is accessible through the Command Line Utility. With it, we can change the values associated with your USB drive. Read more - How to remove write protection

Now type LIST DISK and hitEnter. You should see a table something like the one below. It shows two disks being available: the Hard Disk Drive (HDD) as Disk 0, and the USB flash drive as Disk 1. We know that the USB flash drive is Disk 1 because it is much smaller than Disk 0 at only 7441 MB versus 298 GB. Be very careful from here on out! You can see that if you start working with the wrong disk, things can get ugly quicker than when the lights come on at last call.

At this point, type SELECT DISK 1 and hit Enter. You'll be rewarded with the knowledge that Disk 1 is now the selected disk. Type in ATTRIBUTES DISK, and Diskpart will tell you what you want to know about your flash drive. Most important is the first line Current Read-only State: Yes. This lets us know that, indeed, the flash drive is write protected.
To remove the write protection with Diskpart, type the command ATTRIBUTES DISK CLEAR READONLY. If it works, that will be confirmed by the line Disk attributes cleared successfully.Double-check this by trying to copy a small file to your USB drive. If it works, great. If you still get the write-protect error, it's time to bring out the big guns. Software utilities.

Use The "Apacer USB 3.0 Repair" tool has two functions – format and and restore

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kvdw

I did set

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\StorageDevicePolicies\ WriteProtect=0 ,

and I indeed am able to write to the USB drive, so that's OK.

But I cannot delete files on the UBS drive (so with WriteProtect=0 the disk is 'Delete protected'), only after removing the WriteProtect- key I can delete files again. Is that the way it is supposed to be, or is the alternative values for WriteProtect in order to enable file deletion?