Flash Get Write Protected - How To Unprotect

If I accidently wiggle my flash drive it goes into a full write protect
for the whole drive. (bad connection on my PC)
How do I un-writeprotect a flash drive?

Win XP Pro all the latest updates.

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On Tue, 03 Mar 2015 19:42:28 -0800, Bob R wrote:
If I accidently wiggle my flash drive it goes into a full write protect
for the whole drive. (bad connection on my PC)
How do I un-writeprotect a flash drive?

Win XP Pro all the latest updates.

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Depending on the manufacturer, some drives has a switch or latch for the
write protect.

Find out its brand and model, and get its specifications and manual or user
guide from its website.

Bob R wrote:
If I accidently wiggle my flash drive it goes into a full write protect
for the whole drive. (bad connection on my PC)
How do I un-writeprotect a flash drive?

Win XP Pro all the latest updates.

http://superuser.com/questions/48371...sb-flash-drive

HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\StorageDevic ePolicies\
WriteProtect DWORD=1 if protected

Or using Diskpart, likely to access the same sort of thing.

(Command Prompt) --- Elevated command prompt (Admin)
diskpart
list disk
select disk 1
attributes disk --- See if it is write protected
attributes disk clear readonly --- Clear if write protected
exit

Only problems with the suggestions:

1) No "attributes" in WinXP diskpart program
2) My USB flash stick is not listed as a disk.
Seems a bit strange. In diskmgmt.msc, it is
listed there as disk 1. It really should be
showing up, even if there is no attributes
command. Since I cannot select it, even if
there was an attributes command, I couldn't
use it.

So that leaves Regedit. And on there, I don't
have a StorageDevicePolicies, let alone a WriteProtect.
Maybe these were server OS features or something ?

*******

So the evidence of a leverage point in WinXP
looks slim.

Maybe this is a hardware issue with the key ?
Test the key in another computer.

If the key is not write protected there, then you
know the blockage is stored in the Registry
somewhere.

I do know some flash chips have write-protect,
because our software team at work managed to
accidentally turn them on one day. They then had
to research how to turn them off again. But this
isn't likely to be the problem, because the
write-protect they found, was a "per-segment"
kind. And the USB key would probably die, if
such a thing happened inside. You can't just
arbitrarily pick a portion of the device,
and write protect it, because the USB key
controller chip may be using that for
metadata storage.

Conclusion:

Test in another computer (or at least another OS).
If the key is still write-protected, it's a hardware
issue. If the key is writable, that means the WinXP
OS is blocking it (somehow). And then you could
go looking for the StorageDevicePolicies thing.

Paul

I had this happen too.
It was formatted exFat.
I plugged it into a Win XP PC.
It was still write protected.
I did a Disk Check on the flash drive.
Properties / Tools / Error Checking / Check Now
It said all was OK.
At that point the flash became automatically un-write protected on the
Win XP PC.
I put it back into the XP PC and it was writeable there too.

I did try all the other posted suggestion but that did not work.

Next time (hope not) I will try that in thw Win XP PC.

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