How to Remove Write Protection From Pen Drive and Memory Card

In the modern world, USB pen drives are used in many ways with technology such as to carry our important data and files from one place to another or to save/backup our important data. From the last decade pen drive use has been increased by a large amount among everyone. It's all because of pen drive's space and the amount of data it can carry. We can buy pen drives from 1 GB to 1 TB in the present market.

When we use pen drives to share data between computers, then the common problem is virus attack. Mostly we share our pen drives with friends and family members to get new movies, videos or any other important data. So there is huge space created for virus attack to the pen drive from any computer. There are many types of viruses which can attack our pen drives while some can be deleted with virus guard and some other types of viruses may harm the total pen drive. When some kind of harmful viruses attack the pen drive and change the settings, the pen drive starts to display you right protection error, which you cannot format or do any changes on pen drive.

Today we will discuss, why pen drive shows right protection error message when trying to format, delete or copy data and how to fix the error.

Why USB Pen Drives Shows Right Protection Error?

There are many reasons behind this situation. We can take the following possible situations as reasons for write protection error in pen drives or memory cards.

• Pen drive manufacture company may protect the pen drive from edited. So it's limited to read only purpose.

• The most possible reason is malware and viruses may do some changes in the pen drives and make them right protect enabled.

• Memory cards designed with a small button which allow memory card for read only purpose, so make sure the button is turned on or off.

How to Remove Right Protection Error from Pen Drives and Memory Cards?

There are many software and tricks available in the internet to solve right protection error. But most of them fail to cross the successful result line. Here I have collected the top 5 working write protection remove tricks which works fine in all the Windows evaluation computers.

1. Remove right protection using Windows registry edit
2. Remove right protection by formatting the pen drive before OS boot
3. Remove right protection using command prompt
4. Remove right protection using local group policy
5. Perform Low-Level formatting

Now let's have a deep look on all the above given tricks one by one.

How to Remove Right Protection Using Windows Registry Edit?

You can remove pen drive right protection through Windows registry editor by doing some changes on it. Follow the given below steps to fix the error via registry edit.

• Press Ctrl+R and open Run box
• Now type regedit and hit Enter

• Now Registry Editor will appear. In the Registry Editor go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE --> SYSTEM --> CurrentControlSet --> Control --> StorageDevicePolicies and hit Enter

• Now double click on WriteProtect
• Change the Value data to 0 and click on OK
• Now restart the computer and connect pen drive again. Hopefully the right protection error is fixed.

Note - 

For those who couldn't find the “StorageDevicesPolicies” in the Registry settings, follow the given below  steps.

• Open a new Notepad and copy the given below code and then save it as add.bat (extension should be in .bat)

cd\
reg add "HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\StorageDevicePolicies" /t Reg_dword /v WriteProtect /f /d 1

• Now run the saved file and continue all the steps as given above.

How to Remove Right Protection by Formatting the Pen Drive Before OS Boot?

This is one of the successful trick to format right protected pen drives in all the Windows computer. We can format the pen drive before OS boots by following the given below steps.

First of all shutdown your computer

• Now connect the pen drive with computer and turn on it 
• When computer is booting, press F8 key continuously to reach the Advanced booting option window.
• In that window, select Safe mode with command prompt
• After all files get loaded, navigate to the drive on your right protected pen drive in command prompt.
• At the very first stage it looks as --> C:\ Windows\system 32 >
• Now type the drive letter
• For example, your pen drive letter is 'G', then type G: and hit Enter 
• It should look like this ---> C:\windows\system32>G:
• Now type G:\>format G: and hit Enter
• The system will ask you a conformation command as (Y/N). In this stage you have to type Y to conform and hit Enter again

That's all! Now your right protected pen drive will be formatted before the OS boot. By following this method you can remove pen drive right protection easily. 

How to Remove Right Protection Using Command Prompt?

This is another fine working trick to remove right protection in your pen drive. With few simple commands, you can get back your pen drive error free.

• Open Command Prompt by going to All Program  --> Accessories --> Command Prompt
• Run Command Prompt as administrator
• Now type diskpart and hit Enter (Hit Enter after every command)
• list disk
• select disk 1 (The number may change according to your computer)
• attributes disk clear readonly
• clean
• create partition primary
• format fs=ntfs

That's it! Now you have removed pen drive right protection successfully. I hope this trick is simple and smart to save your pen drive.

How to Remove Right Protection Using Local Group Policy?

Local group policy is the place where configure the read/write policies to the hard drive disks and pen drives which are connected to the computer system. You can remove your pen drive write protection by doing some individual changes in local group policy. Follow the given below steps to carry on the process.

Go to Start --> Run --> In the Run box, type gpedit.msc and hit Enter

• Now Local Group Policy Editor will appear, in that window  
• Go to Computer Configuration --> Administrative Template --> Removable Storage Access 
• Here, you have to disable pen drive's Deny read access/ write access
• Double click on your removable storage device
• Now a window will appear, in that window change the settings from 'Not Configured' to 'Disabled' as shown in image below

That's all the changes you have to do in local group policy to remove right protection in pen drives. 

Perform Low-Level Formatting to Remove Right Protect

Have you tried all the above given tricks? Couldn't get the positive result? Then you need to perform low level formatting to remove the pen drive right protection. Low-Level Formatting is a powerful tool which is used to remove pen drive/memory card write protection.

• Download and install Low-Level Formatting Tool
• Then perform the pen drive formatting procedure using this tool as shown below 

• After the process completes, Open Run and type diskmgmt.msc and then hit Enter 

• Now Disk Management window will appear and in that window you will notice the formatted pen drive/ memory card along with partition
• Now you have to allocate the space for the particular drive

That's it! Now your USB pen drive right protection error is disabled successfully with the help of low-level formatting tool.

Final Words

I hope the above given top 5 tricks will help you to remove your pen drive/memory card write protection successfully. There are many software available in the market to remove pen drive right protection, but most of them are spam. I always suggest you to go with first 4 tricks, where you can do the right protection removal processes without any software involvement. In case, if all the four tricks fail to remove your pen drive right protection, then continue the procedure with last trick which I've suggested in the article. Do it at your own risk.