Flash drive shows "write protected" after file transfer

Aaron Reinhard

New Member
I have a Micro Center branded 128 GB USB 3.0 flash drive. Last month, I transferred TV Show episodes to it. While it seemed to take a longer-than-usual time to transfer, all of the files came up. Two days later, I plugged it in to my tablet and the tablet didn't recognize the drive. Next, I tried it in the original PC and it came up. I could play the files and everything seemed normal...until I tried to delete the files. I would right-click on them and there was no option to delete. (odd...) So, I tried to format the drive in exFAT (recommended). It told me the drive was write-protected...?????? I never write protected it and there is no mechanical switch to do so either. Both the files AND the drive itself claim to be write-protected.
So, I turned to Google. I tried ALL of the suggestions on there (Registry Editor, Safe Mode format, Command Prompt disk attributes, etc.). My next step is to use Hiren and try to boot into a non-Windows based environment to see if that will do the trick. Any other suggestions? Is it possible that it's permanently read-only?
 

Aaron Reinhard

New Member
I checked the file properties...the only option that was checked was Archived. When I tried to remove that, I was told the attributes could not be changed due to the file being write-protected.
 

Aaron Reinhard

New Member
Unfortunately, I still have not figured out why my files on my flash drive come up as write protected. There is no physical switch on the drive to select write protect. If there a "soft" way to remove write-protection. I have no clue how it even got enabled.
 

Darren

Moderator
Staff member
No I haven't. I wanted to see if I could figure it out first with the help of the most awesome computer forum in existence.
Welp. Sounds like you've tried pretty much everything I would. :p If it doesn't let you format it on a different machine and/or outside of Windows then something is funky. Microcenter is known for good customer service but as long as it's been not sure they'd help ya.
 

Aaron Reinhard

New Member
I have one more Windows-based method I found on Youtube (clearing the disk attributes through diskpart on command prompt). After that, I might try a few linux-based utilities before I throw in the towel and contact Micro Center.
 

JaredDM

Active Member
Let me guess....you bought this thumb drive for a really good price on ebay right? Ebay has more spoofed capacity thumb drives for sale than legitimate ones. There's a million sellers out there who are buying cheap-o 4 or 8Gb thumb drives and spoofing the capacity to huge sizes like 128Gb or even up to 1Tb.

Everything seems to work fine until it gets full and the data being written starts to loop back to the beginning of the drive again. By the time most buyers realize they were ripped off, it's already far too late to leave negative feedback or report the seller.

Ebay has been made aware of this hundreds of times but they are perfectly happy to ignore the problem and keep allowing customers to get ripped off.
 
Top