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If you have plugged in a USB flash drive and can’t seem to format it because of write protection, this guide will show you how to remove the write protection. You will also find out how to add write protection to prevent USB Flash drives being formatted easily.
How to Create, Merge, Shrink or Extend Partitions on Windows 10.
Sometimes when you connect a USB drive to your computer and start copying, moving, or deleting files you may receive an unusual The disk is write protected error. If you see this error it means that the drive has write protection and cannot be formatted using the standard procedure. Instead, you will need to manually remove the write protection in order to continue.
How Do You Find Out if a USB Drive Has Write Protection?
The easiest way to find out if a USB drive has write protection is to use the Windows command prompt tool. This can be done by typing cmd into the start menu and selecting Command Prompt from the menu (right-click and open as administrator). Next, in the open CMD window enter the following commands, pressing Enter after each.
Diskpart
List Disk
Select Disk X
Attributes Disk
(X being the actual Drive letter)
Once the commands finish, you will need to check the value next to Current Read-only State and Read-only If the value is Yes, it means write protection is enabled, if the value is No, write protection is disabled for the drive. Check the screenshot above for a better understanding. If you would like to change the write status of the USB drive, follow the steps in the below section.
How to Enable / Disable USB Write Protection on Windows.
Now that you know how to check if your drive does or doesn’t have write protection, we can begin the steps showing you how to change the write protection settings. The first thing you obviously need to do is connect the USB drive you want to change the write protection settings for to your computer. Once the drive is connected, open the Command Prompt tool once again in administrator mode. This time in the CMD window type the following commands, pressing Enter after each:
Diskpart
List Disk
Select Disk X
(X being the actual Drive letter)
To Disable write, delete, and format protection for the USB drive, type the following command and press Enter.
Attributes Disk Clear Readonly
To Enable write, delete, and format protection for the USB drive, type the following command and press Enter.
Attributes Disk Set Readonly
It’s important to remember that if you are wanting to enable write protection to prevent files from being deleted on your USB drive. It only works for the computer you enabled write protection on. Meaning if you connect the USB to another computer, write protection will be disabled.
Note: There are a few USB manufacturers that have hardware write protection, which will enable write protection for the drive no matter what computer you connect it to. You will need to check the specs for your USB drive on the manufacturer's page to find out if you aren’t sure.
