USB Drive Write Protected itself, unable to remove

iptsoe

New Member
Messages
2
Hi all,


Please can somebody help me, I've a relatively new SanDisk Cruzer Slice 64GB USB pen drive, which I use for work mainly. It has somehow managed to write protect itself and no matter what I do I simply cannot remove it!

I've scanned with Antivirus, nothing found

I've tried regedit - Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\
CurrentControlSet\Control\StorageDevicePolicies

StorageDevicePolices didn't exist so I created a 32 bit Dword string, set to 0 this hasn't done anything

I've tried Diskpart as administrator -
DISKPART> list disk
Disk ### Status Size Free Dyn Gpt
-------- ------------- ------- ------- --- ---
Disk 0 Online 298 GB 1024 KB
Disk 1 Online 59 GB 0 B
DISKPART> select disk 1
Disk 1 is now the selected disk.
DISKPART> attributes disk clear readonly
Disk attributes cleared successfully.
DISKPART> clean
DiskPart has encountered an error: The request could not be performed because of
an I/O device error.
See the System Event Log for more information.

I've checked the logs and it doesn't seem to list anything for the drive
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    8.1
    Computer type
    Laptop
How is the disk formatted? FAT32 (I believe the default, could be wrong) or NTFS?

If it's FAT32, and you are trying to copy a file larger than 4GB, then it's not going to let you write to it due to the limitations of FAT32. You would have to re-format the disk to NTFS.

It also could be possible that the disk became corrupted during a write operation (ie., not using "remove") in the system tray when unplugging the drive from the computer...

Copy whatever files you currently have on the disk to your HD for temporary safekeeping and format the disk again.

Also, what version of Windows are you using? Is it the Professional version or Home version? Are you using, or did use, bitlocker on this machine? Or a TPM? If you did, bitlocker automatically changes some policies to read only for removeable drives, and if you have Windows 8 Pro, we can go in a fix that throught the group policy editor.
 
Last edited:

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    Win8 Pro
Its NTFS, it also only actually has just under 5GB of space used on it.

I can't actually format the drive each time I try I get an error message about the drive being write protected
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    8.1
    Computer type
    Laptop
If you tried everything and are still failing to be able to remove the write protection, follow the link below and go to "Samy Youssef's" post near the bottom of the page, many of the people who were experiencing the same problems as you were able to get the drive restored to default functionality by following his directions:

Usb flash drive write protected cannot format - Flash Media - Storage
 
Last edited:

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    Win8 Pro
Back
Top