Some times your USB thumb drive or pen drive may face this weired problem, although the drive seems normal and is being detected by the OS, yet it shows the drive is write protected when you try to put some data on it. It can be because of physical errors in the drive or may be because of just some misconfiguration.

Common causes:

  • flash drive removal without using “safely remove hardware” or ejecting drive (OS X/Linux/Windows 7)
  • Unplugging the flash drive while data is being written to the drive

Common errors are:

  •  “unable to access”
  •  “track 0 error”
  •  “write protection”
  •  “Size is 0 byte” or “RAW file system”

Here are few tips you can follow when you face such situations:

Regedit Method:

-run “regedit” command
-find “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/System/Control/StorageDevicePolicies/
-Double click at “Write Protect”
-Change the value to “0”

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HP Drive Key Boot Utility Method:

Download and Install HP Drive Key Boot Utility : http://snipurl.com/hpbootutil

It should work for most brands of flash drives.

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Also check if your drive has write protect notch some where, toggle it then try to format it again.

I hope this would solve your problem. 🙂

 

Update:

If both of the above solutions didn’t work for your drive, then you can try the following:

  • Download Apacer Low Level Formatter.
  • Remove all other USB thumb drives USB Hard Disks etc and attach only the Drive with problem.
  • Unzip and run: Repair_v2.9.1.1.exe
  • It will detect the USB drive and start low level format on the drive. It could take a while, just wait.
  • After the low level format if over, you can normally format the drive and use it as normal. While formatting uncheck “Quick format” option.

Warning: Low Level format will completly distroy any data on drive, So take backup from the drive before using this tip.