##HOT## Download Software Format Usb Write Protect
Nicoletta Monjure
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If your pen drive is write-protected, you may not have the ability to modify files or format the drive. There are a few things you can do to remove write protection from a USB drive. However, it's also possible the drive may be failing or locked with security software making it impossible to write to. This wikiHow teaches you how to remove write protection from your USB pen drive on a Windows or macOS computer.
Second its not clear yet if you have a "soft" OS/filesystem/partition write protect, or a lower-level "hard" write-protect error. If it is OS/format there could be a registry issue or something similar, however if you do a diskpart and see no write protect attributes and nothing in the registry, or able to mount read/write via another OS including *nix, then you may have a "hard" write-protect.
Move the USB device to another computer, or boot using gpart and clear the partitions (e.g. all of them) and recreate. Run a long format to make sure it formats ok, if you are actually getting device/flash level write protects, you might get lucky and the devices fw/ftl might do a bad block/page revector of the offending page/block adding it to the glist etc.
Is the stick toasted, or, is the partition table, partitions, formats/filesystems toast? see above post as last step before discarding the stick assuming you still need or find value in the stick. Have had many USB sticks (and other devices) that appear dead, failed only to repartition, reformat and they live only for many more years until a future partition, format or filesystem issue... Otoh, maybe it is physically toast...
If you can get to the GUI and start/open programs, select disks to view which disks ubuntu see's, it should tell you the drive, device, what it is, its serial number, other info that you can confirm which device you want to work with and verify which /dev/sd"x" you will be using. You can try doing a format/partition from the disk program, or open gpart if you have it, or add it to your ubuntu to gpart the offending usb drive. Just becareful that you do not select the wrong drive, check, double-check, triple check so you dont clobber the wrong device as its easy to make a mistake or type the wrong thing, take your time.
Use the bootable live gpart USB then to boot a computer and insert the bad USB stick, tell gpart to select which drive to use or look at (be careful), assuming gpart see's the bad USB drive, you can then tell gpart live to delete the partition table (be very very careful not to do the wrong drive). You can then create a new partition on the USB stick unless there is an actual hardware write-protect. Even if there is a bad hardware write protect page, you might be able to partition around it.
I hope you have some luck getting the stick to work again. Anytime you have a flash-based device (including SSDs) which puts itself in write protect mode, it's not going to be a healthy device. First thing to do is offload all you important data, and it sounds like you did that.
Even with gpart you should be able to force an overwrite/delete of the partition unless the drive has locked itself (e.g. something in the fw/ftl) which in that case congrats, you now have a read-only device.
where we asume that /dev/sdb is the Physical disk device we're working on.If the device has partitions that are mounted as read-only, you should re-mount 'em as read-write in order to write data to them.
Angel's answer is good, but the actual commands weren't so easy for me. This is what worked :Plug in the card (mine is an SD card with a manual write-protect switch on it, but the switch is off and it is writable on a Windows machine).Ubuntu mounted it automatically on /media/andrew/6AB0-1FD91, and dmesg showed the partition to be /dev/sdb1.
it'll still complain that it's read-only. I don't know why I had to change this flag before AND after mounting, but that's the only way it worked for me. Set it to writeable again, and remount it at the same place
So I have a an older Canon EOS Rebel XSI. I just bought a new High Performance SDHC Memory Card 16 GB. No matter what I do I can't get it to work. I flip the notch on the side, up down middle so forth. It keeps saying Card write protected. I have probably had about 20 differnt cards in the last12 years. I never had it not work. I am unsure if it is states it is High performance or what. I personally think it is a bad card. Any suggestions?
Do other cards give the same error? If yes, then the switch in the camera that senses where the write protect switch on the card is positioned may be sticking. If not it would seem like a card problem. Can you put the card in a reader or a computer and try to format it?
Yesterday, every card I put in the camera said it was locked, even though none of them were. If the switch in the camera that senses where the write protect switch on the card is positioned, is sticking, is that something i can fix?
To write-protect a 5-1/4-inch disk, grab one of those tiny tabs that came with the disk in the box. Peel the tab and place it over the notch in the disk, which should be on the lower left side as you insert the disk into the drive (see Figure 1). With that notch covered, the disk is write-protected.
To un-write-protect a 5-1/4-inch disk, peel off the little tab. Although this action renders the disk sticky, it's a livable problem. You can un-write-protect 3-1/2-inch disks by sliding the tile over the hole.
Obviously, you shouldn't erase a disk you don't want to erase. All the data on the disk goes bye-bye. The only way to avoid this situation is to be careful: Check the disk with the DIR command first. Make sure that it's a disk you want to reformat.
Don't be afraid to erase disks. You may have stacks of old disks that you can reformat and use. The data on them may be old or duplicated elsewhere, so reusing the disk is no problem. Here's the FORMAT command you want to use:
They're probably formatted NTFS, which Mac OS X can read but not write. You can just reformat the drive as FAT32 (MS-DOS format in Disk Utility) and it will work just fine with both your Mac and Windows systems.
I have the exact same issue as described above with all of the formatting options on Disk Utility grayed out. The USB used to work fine - allowing me to delete and save files - and it's the same Mac I've always used it on. No idea why/how it suddenly became write-protected/read-only!
Csound1, all of the options are grayed out - both 'Erase' and 'Erase Free Space'. On all of the tabs the only option that is available is 'Verify Disk' and even that produces no further options. The current format is MS-DOS (FAT32).
Regarding frustrating tech error messages, "This drive is write protected" is right up there with the infamous "PC LOAD LETTER." You're just trying to save some files, and suddenly, your USB drive is giving you an attitude?
You could grab another flash drive, especially if you have plenty of bulk USB drives. However, if you know how write protection works, you might be able to remove it! Let's learn a little about this flash drive feature and why it exists. Then, we'll show you six easy options for removing write protection on a USB.
Write protection mode is a hardware or software feature that prevents the files on a USB drive from being removed, copied or altered. It's also known as read-only mode. While the drive is in this mode, a user can access files, but can't modify them. That means no adding files, deleting files, copying files, editing files - you get the idea.
The answer depends on how the write protection on your USB drive is set up. On some drives, the write protection is configured using the mass storage controller chip firmware. At USB Memory Direct, we often add this feature at our clients' request. This write protection can't be removed, and we recommend you use another drive.
First, look for a tiny switch on the body of your drive. This is a write protection switch that puts your drive into write protect mode, and it can be easy to accidentally activate it in a pocket or backpack. All you'll need to do is flick the switch into the "off" position. Write protection switches are no longer common on new USB drives, but it's always worth checking.
Lastly, you can also try reformatting the USB drive to remove the write protection. This will delete all of the data on the drive, so make sure anything you want to save is backed up! Use our guides to learn how to format a USB on macOS or Windows 10.
The RO firmware is the first thing executed at power on/boot and is responsible for verifying & loading the next piece of code in the system which is usually the Linux kernel. There might be other components that are loaded/chained (read-write (RW) firmware, etc...) before loading the Linux kernel (see Verified Boot for more information), but those details are immaterial here. The point is that the entire system security hinges upon the integrity of the RO firmware.
We guarantee the RO firmware integrity via the Write Protect (WP) signal. This is a physical line to the flash (where the RO firmware is stored) that tells the flash chip to mark some parts as read-only and to reject any modification requests. So even if Chrome OS was full of bugs and was exploited to gain all the permissions for direct write access to all pieces of hardware in the system, any RO firmware write attempts from code running on the CPU would be stopped by the flash chip itself. Then when the system reboots, the verified boot process would detect any modifications or corruption to the hard drive (e.g. kernel/root filesystem) and interrupt the normal boot flow initiating the Chrome OS recovery process. Thus we can confidently tell customers: if you can reboot a Chromebook into the login screen, you know it's secure.
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