remove write protection from a USB stick

['chris']

Hi

I cannot format USB stick using HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool V2.1.8.
I get a message:

"device media write-protected"

How do I remove write protection?

[Dennis Handly · Accepted solution]

What type/size of USB stick is it?

[P Muralidhar Kini]

Hi Chris,

>> How do I remove write protection?
May be someone has enabled write protection for the USB devices on the system.

In order to prevent any user to copy sensitive data from the system to a USB drive, there is a way by which you can make the USB devices connected to the system as write protected. This involves changes to the windows registry.
i.e. changes to WriteProtect in StorageDevicePolicies registry Key.

To Disable write access to USB drives,
1.Run Registry Editor (regedit).
2.Navigate to the following registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control
3.Create a New Key named as StorageDevicePolicies.
4.Highlight StorageDevicePolicies, and then create a New DWORD (32-bit) Value named as WriteProtect.
5.Double click on WriteProtect, and set its value data to 1.

For more info, Refer
http://www.mydigitallife.info/2008/06/26/how-to-disable-write-access-to-usb-hard-disk-and-flash-key-...

You can check the registry, whether there is a StorageDevicePolicies key already created having WriteProtect set to 1. If yes then someone has made a attempt to make all USB devices write protected. You can then change the value of WriteProtect to 0 in case you dont want the USB to be write protected.

Any changes to the windows registry should be done with lot of caution.
Hope this helps.

Regards,
Murali

[P Muralidhar Kini]

Hi Chris,

Did the problem get solved ?
Did the above information help ?

Regards,
Murali

['chris']

Thx a lot, this is no-name USB stick.
It's quite strange, I can format others USB sticks without any problems, only this one not.

Anyway, I tried to play with these registry settings. I've created StorageDevicePolicies key with WriteProtect -> 0 dword and now it seems to work.