Why is my USB Flash Drive Now Read-Only? [duplicate]

Suddenly my USB Flash Drive (8gb Corsaire Voyager) is suddenly read-only, and I'm not sure why.

There is no "read-only" switch on the drive. All of the data is still there. But nothing can be written to it anymore. There are 2gb free on the drive. The OS is Windows7 Pro x64. It wasn't this way yesterday.

In FreeCommander, if I try to create a new folder on the drive, it tells me the drive is write-protected.

I plugged it into a different computer and it is read-only there, too.

What could cause that, and how can I get it back to read/write mode like it ought to be? I know I can fix it by reformatting it, but I don't want to do it that way.

I have found several solutions to do this, but haven't solved it yet:

• Safely Eject Flash Drive
• Make a registry edit (the key doesn't exist, however)
• Add the registry key (that didn't exist) and set the value to 0 (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\StorageDevicePolicies set WriteProtect to 0)
• Reassign the drive letter
• "Scan and Fix" (check disk dialogue appears when you plug it in) - write-protection prevents this, however.

Solution 1:

Open cmd.exe as administrator. Then run the following commands:

1. Type in diskpart.exe and press enter. This will open command line based disk management utility, indicator will change to DISKPART>
2. Within diskpart, type list disk and press enter. This will show all connected disks. Notice the "Size" column and make a note of the disk # you are concerned with.
3. Now type select disk X where X is the numerical digit from step 2.
4. To see its attributes, type attributes disk and press enter.
5. Now that we've ensured it is indeed a read-only disk, we will need to clear the flag. Simply type attributes disk clear readonly and press enter. This should clear the read-only flag.

Now you can format using diskpart or use Windows explorer to manage it.

Solution 2:

The drive is going bad. I've seen this happen to USB flash drives before - they are only temporarily good for storage, and you have to keep them backed up.

To confirm that the drive is bad, whilst copying files from the drive I see that it says certain files that are queued for copying do not exist.

Also, it is marked with write-protection, even though there are no registry entries causing that to be so.

A DOS prompt cannot be had!

Trying to copy files from the drive is nearly impossible.

Time to buy a new flash drive.