One common type of error that can occur on a USB stick or SD memory card is that it is write protected, which means that it is not possible to add, delete or edit files inside. Therefore you cannot save a modified document, you cannot copy a new file, you cannot even delete something because every operation is denied, except for reading.
So if the USB stick is write-protected and you don't know why this problem happened, there are some solutions to solve it, some of which are easy and painless, others more definitive, which erase the contents of the memory, formatting the USB stick protected.
In the following article we list the various solutions in order of difficulty, starting from the simplest one to unlock the protection, arriving and ending with the most laborious one, to format the protected USB stick, which will surely work.
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1) Check for viruses in the USB drive or SD card .
Whenever you connect a USB drive to your computer, you should always do an automatic memory scan before using it.
It is therefore worthwhile, since it is a very fast operation, open the Computer folder, click on the USB drive icon with the right mouse button and scan with the available antivirus, which on Windows 10 and Windows 8.1 PCs it can be Windows Defender.
2) Check if there is a switch on the USB drive or the SD card .
Usually this is the most frequent reason for the write-protected disk failure, the hardware protection of a switch.
This type of block is always present on SD cards, with a small red lever, while on USB sticks it may be there or not.
If this switch is there, move it to the position and try again.
3) Check that the unit is not full
From Windows Explorer, go to the " This PC " folder, right-click on the USB drive, go to the Properties and check that it is not full, that is, that there is enough space available.
4) If it only happens with a file
If the write protection error occurs with one file and not with another, it means that it is not the USB stick that is protected, but that file that cannot be moved (although it should always be possible to copy it).
Press the right mouse button on that file, go to Properties, check, in the Attributes section, that it is not read-only and then, in the Security tab, that you have write permissions.
Another reason why a file cannot be copied to a USB drive may be because of a too long name (more than 255 characters).
Then try to rename that file with a shorter name.
5) Remove any write protection on the USB stick from the command prompt
With this procedure, you can remove the protection from the USB drive.
Then open the command prompt from the Start menu and type the following commands by pressing enter after each one.
diskpart
list disk
Here you have to recognize the USB drive based on its space capacity and look at what number has been assigned to it.
select disk N
Replace the N with the correct number.
attributes disk clear readonly
6) Remove the write protection on the Windows PC from the registry .
If none of the previous steps solved the write-protection problem, you can try a modification on the Windows registry (if you are not familiar with it, go to the next level).
From the Start menu, search for and run the regedit tool.
From the registry, navigate the folders on the left according to the following path:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SYSTEM \ CurrentControlSet \ Control \ StorageDevicePolicies
On the right side check if there is a key named WriteProtect .
If there is, double-click it and change the value from 1 to 0, which means no write protection on USB drives.
If there is no key of this type, it is worth, while we are here, to add it.
Then right-click on the empty space on the right, create a new DWORD (32-bit) with the name WriteProtect, then click on it twice and give it a value of 0.
7) Format the write-protected USB stick
Formatting the USB stick or SD card means resetting it and erasing everything inside it.
To do this, you can simply open Windows Explorer, go to the This PC folder, the one that lists the disks, then right-click on the USB drive and click on Format .
The Format window contains several customizable options, such as the type of file system, the size of the allocation unit, the volume label and the Quick format option.
You can also leave all the default options, but it is better to remove the Quick Format selection, in order to force the tool to delete the files and detect any errors.
Better yet, it is better to follow the guide to clean and recover space on the USB stick to be formatted using once again the diskpart command as seen above in point 5.
The commands to format a USB stick or SD card properly are therefore:
diskpart
list disk
select disk N
Replace the N with the number corresponding to the recognized drive to be formatted after executing the list disk command.
attributes disk clear readonly
So as to remove all protection
clean
To delete all the files inside
create partition primary
To create a primary partition on the USB drive
format fs = fat32
To format the stick.
It can also be formatted with a program, perhaps those that allow low-level formatting of the unit (that is, that erases all the memory definitively and totally).
One of these programs is HDD LLF Low Level Format Tool, very simple to use and free.
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