USB pen drive suddenly became read-only [duplicate]

You can try booting into a Linux system, and remounting it as read-write.

First, boot up your computer to any Linux. Then, plug your usb drive into your computer. (assuming the drive isn't dead from driving)

In this case, I will assume your drive is called

/dev/sdb

You can check this by doing fdisk -l when the drive is not plugged in, and doing it again when it is. Then compare the results.

Once you have found out what it is called, you can try remounting it as read-write.

sudo mount -o remount,rw /dev/sdb

At this point, it may complain that it is write-protected. In that case, you may also have to run sudo hdparm -r0 /dev/sdb

Then try remounting read-write again.

You should then be able to format it. You can do this with:

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb

Be careful with this command, a mistype with dd can format your HDD.

If you want to work on a specific partition, you will have to specify a number after the drive name. (eg.

/dev/sdb1

is your drive, partition 1)

If none of this works, can you try posting dmesg | tail after plugging it in?

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