How to Enable and Disable Write Protection of USB Flash Drive

USB Flash drive or Pendrives are the easiest way to carry and transfer any type of data like image, documents, music, movies etc from one computer to another.

The higher capacity of flash drives are also used for data storage. Flash drives are very useful in  Windows Installation and certain troubleshooting.

However, sometimes you may get an error while transferring data from computer to USB flash drive that “The disk is write protected, remove the write protection or use another disk”.

This error occurs when Write protection to your USB flash drive is enabled and you cannot transfer any data to flash drive and can’t delete data from flash drive, however, you can copy data from flash drive to your computer.

Write protection to flash drive is sometimes useful, lets you have some important data then enable write protection and prevent from accidental deletion or format, also it is not easy to delete data for a non-tech person.

So enabling and disabling write protection is a good idea to keep your data secure, sometimes due to the different type of malware, it automatically becomes Write Protected in such case you can disable write protection using below technique.

Disable Write Protection to USB Flash Drive.

Usually, people take Write protection as a problem, since they are unable to copy  data to flash drive so this is a big issue, many people throw their flash drive assuming that it is useless now, so here are simple steps by which you can disable Write protection from usb drive using command prompt.

1. Insert your flash drive, Go to Start and search for cmd right click on it and “run as administrator” or windows 8, 8.1 user press Start button + X and select Command Prompt (Admin).

2. Once the command prompt is open, type diskpart  and hit Enter, it will give you access to manage disk partition.

3. Type list disk  and hit Enter, it will show you all connected disk to your computer, like disk 0, disk 1 along  with their storage capacity.

4. Recognise your flash drive by its storage capacity like mine is  16 GB ( As per Manufacturer) which is showing here  14 GB (Actual Size) as Disk 1 or remove all other external drive except your Flash Drive, then you will get as above and Disk 1 is going to be your Flash drive.

5. Now type Select Disk #  ( Select disk disk no. )  as in above case i need to type Select disk 1 and hit Enter. It will select disk 1 and any further command will apply on disk 1.

6.  Now you need to check if your flash drive is Write protected, just type attributes disk  and hit enter, it will show you the current status of disk protection.

Currently, the disk is write protected

as in above image it shows that disk is write protected.

7. Now, to disable write protection from flash drive type attributes disk clear readonly and hit enter.

After executing above command your flash drive will not be write protected any-more, you can copy and delete data from your flash drive as usual.

 Enable Write Protection to Flash Drive

Lets say in any case you want to protect your data from deletion or formatting flash drive then you can enable write protection which will help you to secure your data in flash drive.

To enable write protection follow step 1-6 and then type attributes disk set readonly and hit enter.

This will set your flash drive in Read Only mode i,e write protected.

All above steps to enable and disable write protection applies on USB flash drive, Micro SD Cards, and any other removable storage device, in case if you have Camera Memory card then first you need to check the lock button on the side of memory card if it is write protected then flip the lock switch on other side (Up Down) it will disable write protection from Camera Memory card, or if you are using memory card holder for SD Cards.

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Also you can follow above steps if lock button does not work or broken.

If you want to buy a USB 3.0 Flash drive for faster read and write operation then here is my recommendation for you, this flash drive and its performance is tested by me. Buy Faster USB 3.0 Flash Drive from Amazon (affiliate link) which has transfer speed up to 225 MB/s.

Also Read . How to Make Flash Drive Bootable Using Command Prompt and Install Windows