Thursday, 8 January 2015

How to remove write protection from USB flash drives

Security from viruses is among the greatest priorities for any Windows user. USB flash drives such as pendrives are most likely to catch viruses from any devices and may harm your files. There are some recovery techniques available after corruption of data due to virus or say malware attack but still you notice that every now and then pendrives catch viruses.

usb flash drives write protected gdrive

For the security purpose many people use write protection on their USB flash drives, pendrives so that it may not affect by the malware attack. But if you want to remove write protection on the pendrive or any other external USB flash drive for copying any important file you can do this using this simple registry tweaking trick.

How to remove write protection from USB flash drives

Method 1: Using Registry 

Follow the steps and you can write data to your pen drive.

*. Open notepad or any text editor and copy & paste the following:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlStorageDevicePolicies] “WriteProtect”=dword:00000000

*. Now save the file with .reg extension.

registry file

*. Now double click on the file you have saved and in the pop up window choose Yes and you will see the message as in the screenshot below. That's it just press OK and you're done, now you can write any type of data on the pen drive.

registry key applied successfully

To Turn ON the write protection you may follow the same procedure as above but paste the following code instead of above

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlStorageDevicePolicies] “WriteProtect”=dword:00000001

Method 2: Using Diskpart

*. Open command prompt as an administrator and type diskpart.

*. Then type list disk and press enter to see the list of drives.

*. Select the USB drive by typing  select disk 1 (if disk 1 is your USB drive otherwise choose the number which assigned to your  USB drive)

*. At last type attributes disk clear readonly and press enter. Finally type exit  to quit diskpart and you're done with the process.

cmd diskpart commands to remove read only

That's it you have no write protection on the usb drive now. Enjoy the trick and keep your system safe from viruses.

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