Remove Write Protection from USB

Write protection is defined as the ability of a hardware device or software program to prevent new information from being written, meanwhile old information from being modified or changed. In simple words, when a disk is write-protected, you cannot use it normally to write data or copy data on it.

 

Generally, most USB-based Flash/Pen drives provide a write protection button that prevents from data being moved to or from the Pen drive. However, we can copy or paste the USB data by unlocking the write protection button.

A normal USB become write-protected because of the virus. It is somewhat difficult to remove write protection from USB.

Method 1: Change Pen Drive Read-Write Properties

• Go to My Computer/This PC and under Devices with Removable Storage, look for your pen drive device. 
• Right-click on it and click Properties. Click Edit, in the pop-up box, sometimes there's an option to Remove write protection. Change the status of this option and try again.

Method 2: Disable Write Protection Using CMD

Windows Command Prompt is the must-attempt method to remove write protection from any drive in Windows 10 and lower. If you are willing to challenge the command that seems to be a little higher-levelled, it is very likely that you can successfully remove over 90% write protection from a pen drive.

•  Search the command prompt in Windows and run the program as an administrator.
• On the Windows Command Prompt, type each command line as follows and each command should be followed by an Enter key. 

diskpart

list disk

select disk #

attributes disk clear read only 

NOTE - Instead of #, you need to type the number of the disk (check the size and match the number).

•  When the write protection has been removed, you will see the message 'Disk attribute cleared successfully'. Type exit, so you can close the window.

NOTE - Do not try to format a write-protected USB flash drive before you can find a way to remove the write protection. When the pen drive is write-protected, you can neither use the native Windows disk formatting programs nor any third-party USB formatter to format it.

After removing the write protection from your pen drive, now you can feel free to format it without a hitch. EaseUS Partition Master is the highly recommended free partition manager that enables users to format a USB drive to FAT32 or NTFS or EXT. 

We hope this helps. If any suggestions or doubts you can add a comment and we will reply as soon as possible.