Years ago, when floppy discs were the norm, I was used to having to flip the write protect switch (or cover over the notch on older discs) but I was a little surprised today when I couldn’t write to my USB removable hard drive because Windows 7 told me that the media was write protected. I tried adjusting the properties on folders but the actual disk was showing as write protected – very strange.
I still don’t know why this occurred but this was the disk that I use to keep personal items separate from work on my company-supplied notebook, which runs BeCrypt DiskProtect – and I suspect DiskProtect may be part of the issue. Nevertheless, I did find an apparant solution, courtesy of a post at Windows Seven Forums that refers to a post on the T3chworks site.
By running diskpart.exe from an elevated command prompt (cmd.exe), I was able to issue a few commands to remove the readonly attribute on the media and write files to it again:
list volume
select volume volumenumber
attributes disk clear readonly
Only time will tell if this is a permanent fix (the post also talks of modifying a registry entry at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\StorageDevicePolicies\WriteProtect but that’s not present on my system) but I’ve never seen this before, and it seems to have done the trick for the time being.
This can be extremely useful to set the read only flag on for thumb drives that I carry around. I almost always assume that plugging into an unknown computer will infect it with a virus.
can you possibly convert this up in a video?? please? i am a lay person but i always encounter read only files..please help me understand the fixing solutions.