How to Fix The Disk is Write Protected

If you Cannot format your USB pen drive because it is write-protected? And Get “The disk is write protected” error message while trying to format the flash drive, pen drive or SD card? Some removable storage devices like USB flash drives or pen drive have to write protection which is designed to help users prevent unexpected data loss by refusing to delete or format. If you’re stuck with a write-protected USB drive that can’t be formatted with “The disk is write protected” error, please don’t worry! Here is a simple way you can try to remove the write protection and format the USB flash drive and pen drive with no hassle.

First – Removing Physical Write Protection

1. Place the SD card label-side-up on a flat surface.
2. Locate the lock switch.
3. Slide the lock switch toward the gold connectors at the bottom of the SD card.

Second – Removing Digital Write Protection on Windows

Method – 1 

Click Start, type Regedit in the search box, click Regedit.exe to open the Registry editor when you see it is displayed at the top of the list. And then navigate to the following key:

Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\StorageDevicePolicies

Double-click on the WriteProtect value in the right-hand pane of Regedit.exe. Change the Value data from 1 to 0 and click OK to save the change. Close Regedit and restart your computer. Connect your USB flash drive or pen drive again, and you should find the write protection is removed and the device is no longer write protected.

After that, you can now format the drive as normal by right-clicking on it in My Computer and choosing Format. “The disk is write protected” error message will no longer pop up.

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Method – 2 

1. Make sure that you’re using an administrator account. You’ll need to be on an administrator account in order to open the Disk Partition tool, which is what you’ll use to remove the write protection from your SD card.
2. Plug the SD card into your computer. If your computer has an SD card reader, the card should slide label-up and gold connectors-first into the reader.

   If your PC doesn’t have a card reader, you’ll need a USB SD card adapter to do this.

3. Open Start 
   

   Click the Windows logo in the bottom-left corner of the screen.
4. Open Command Prompt. Type in command prompt, then click
   

   Command Prompt at the top of the Start menu when it appears.
5. Enter the Disk Partition command. Type diskpart into Command Prompt, then press ↵ Enter.
6. Click Yes when prompted. Doing so will confirm your decision and open the Disk Partition window, which resembles another Command Prompt window.
7. Bring up a list of your computer’s disks. Type in list disk and press ↵ Enter.

8. Determine your SD card’s number. You can find your SD card by looking for a number of megabytes or gigabytes that correlates with your SD card’s storage in the “Size” column; the number to the right of “Disk” on the far left side of this value is your SD card’s number.

   • For example, if you see that the storage size for Disk 3 mirrors your SD card’s remaining space, your SD card’s number is “3”.
   • The top disk (Disk 0) will always be your computer’s built-in hard drive.
9. Select your SD card. Type in select disk number where “number” is replaced by the SD card’s number, then press ↵ Enter. This will tell the Disk Partition tool to apply the next command to your SD card.
   • For example, if your SD card is labeled as “Disk 3” in the list of computer disks, you’d type select disk 3 here.
10. Clear the “read-only” attribute. Type in attributes disk clear read-only and press ↵ Enter. You should see a line of text that reads “Disk attributes cleared successfully” appear in the window below your cursor, signifying that your SD card is no longer write-protected.