You may come across situations where you have inserted any USB Flash drive on to your personal computer and then tried to format the USB Flash drive that you inserted but encountered with the error that says something like “Your Disk is Write Protected, Cannot Format!”. Which means, you won’t be allowed to format a write protected USB flash drive, no matter what method you try.
Well, basically speaking, USB Flash Drives that have write protection in them is a security feature added to USB Flash drives to protect data that are stored on to any USB Flash Drive that may be of high priority and cannot be lost due to formatting even by mistake. We do commit mistakes of accidently formatting USB hard drives while checking out some features of USB flash drives, or data may even get erased or modified from any USB Flash Drive if the system in which the USB flash drive has been inserted contains some malwares or viruses.
Even though write protection on USB drives and even SD cards are some good security feature to protect any data stored in them from being modified or erased, there actually come times when we have to purposely erase data from write protected USB drives and SD cards but aren’t allowed to.
If you are currently facing such a situation where you are unable to delete or completely erase data from write protected USB drives and SD cards, then below is a very well explained guide on how you can easily achieve the task of deleting data from write protected USB drives and even SD cards in no time.
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How to Format USB Flash Drives that is Write Protected?
There are different methods by which you can actually format write protected USB drives without any issues. And below are some of them listed out to help you format any write protected USB drives without facing much difficulty.
How to Format Write Protected USB using Command Prompt:
- Insert your USB Drive to the PC.
- Launch the Command Prompt on your Windows PC. You can do the same by navigating to the Start menu and then in the search bar that is provided, type “cmd” and search for the same. When you launch the Command Prompt window, make sure that you run the same as administrator.
- Type in the command “diskpart” and press Enter.
- Now type the command “list disk” and then Enter.
- Identify the USB Drive that you inserted in Step 1 from the list that appears.
- Take a look at the name of your USB Drive that appears under the column “DISK ###”.
- Now type the command “Select DISKNAME” (Replace DISKNAME with the name of your USB Drive from above step) and press Enter.
- Now type the command “attributes disk clear readonly” and hit the Enter key.
- You will now receive the message “disk attributes are cleared successfully”, if everything goes right.
- Now you will be able to format your USB Drive following the normal procedures from My Computer.
How to Format Write Protected USB Flash Drive using Registry:
- From the desktop of your Windows PC, press the Windows key+R key at the same time.
- From the Run tool that appears, type the command “regedit” and press Enter.
- Follow the path “Computer|HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE|SYSTEM|CurrentControlSet|Control|StorageDevicePolicies”.
- Once the above path is completed, you will see “Writeprotect” in the left part of the screen.
- Double click on the “Writeprotect” option.
- From the pop-up window, change the value of “Value Data” from 1 to 0 in order to disable the write protection on your USB.
- Press OK and you are done.
Final Words:
Hope you found this guide on how to format write protected USB drives easy to understand and follow. Do share it on your social media profiles to help any of your friends or contacts facing a similar issue.
