USB Drives become write protected

techperson3435 · Jan 30, 2018

I have many USB drives that have become write protected. I cannot format them with Mac, Linux or Windows. One of them is a SanDisk Ultra USB 3.0 32GB, and a few other generic ones. I have found that this happens mostly when I create bootable disks, eg. WindowsToGo installations and MacOS install drives. How can I fix this?

fry178 · Jan 30, 2018

did you go to win disc management and tried to remove the partition?
then reboot and you might have to go to disc management again to initialize the drive before being able to format.

if that doesnt work, use testdisk (v7) to remove the MFT (careful when selecting the drive, unplug all non essential drives from pc if possible).

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

techperson3435 · Jan 31, 2018

fry178 :

I have tried to remove the partitions with Disk Management but the 'delete volume' button is greyed out. I tried TestDisk and it just said 'Write error: Can't clear partition table.'

fry178 · Jan 31, 2018

did you try a different machine?
might be the computer/usb port.

techperson3435 · Jan 31, 2018

fry178 :

I have used 8 different computers, all the operating systems you can imagine, and it has happened to quite a few of my usb drives over the years, now just sitting in a box, unusable.

fry178 · Jan 31, 2018

than they are more or less broken, as the chance that multiple different rigs/os are all experiencing the same problem, is like zero.

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