WRITE PROTECTED FLASH DRIVE

Irishgoatman

I've a 125gb flash drive that has decided, off its own back, to become write protected!.

The files that are on it are not protected, I've copied them to my hard and checked that they can be deleted, and are no longer needed.

My questions are: How do I change the setting for the flash drive and how did it manage to protect itself in the first place?.

The drive was very cheap from the far east so I'm not too concerned if I have to scrap it and the files are just music files with no personal info.

Any help appreciated.

CreepingDeath

Irishgoatman wrote: »

I've a 125gb flash drive that has decided, off its own back, to become write protected!.

...
The drive was very cheap from the far east

Do you have 120Gb+ of data on it ?

If it was "very cheap", it could be a fake... ie. a 16Gb card pretending to be 128Gb.
Only when you try writing more than 16Gb do you hit trouble.

Other than that, I'm not sure if any USB keys have hardware switches to become read-only, like the SD cards.

Irishgoatman

CreepingDeath wrote: »

Do you have 120Gb+ of data on it ?

If it was "very cheap", it could be a fake... ie. a 16Gb card pretending to be 128Gb.
Only when you try writing more than 16Gb do you hit trouble.

Other than that, I'm not sure if any USB keys have hardware switches to become read-only, like the SD cards.

It shows 41.9GB used and 75.2GB free with total capacity of 117GB.
It was sold to me as a 128gb so I assumed, perhaps wrongly, that diff was used in formatting/write protecting. It's formatted as Fat 32.
It is a pen/flash drive, not a card.

As I said, I've no problem with destroying it because obviously I can't use it, I just dislike weird mysteries like this one!.

ItHurtsWhenIP

Irishgoatman wrote: »

It shows 41.9GB used and 75.2GB free with total capacity of 117GB.
It was sold to me as a 128gb so I assumed, perhaps wrongly, that diff was used in formatting/write protecting. It's formatted as Fat 32.
It is a pen/flash drive, not a card.

As I said, I've no problem with destroying it because obviously I can't use it, I just dislike weird mysteries like this one!.

If I remember rightly, FAT32 has a max partition size of 32GB in the M$FT world. That might be the problem - format her for NTFS and it should be OK.

bonzodog2

There's a free program to test USB sticks/SD card called H2testw
http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/System-Miscellaneous/H2testw.shtml
I have bought several cheap "32GB" uSD cards that have proved to only have ~7.5GB reliable storage.
I have another SD card, genuine I think, but only 1GB that I was using in a camera. A little while back it seemed to become read-only. So I just started using another card. More recently I tried "scan for errors" on the card from Win7; it found some error, and a picture I remember taking on another camera but had thought failed. Card is now writable.

Irishgoatman

MMFITWGDV wrote: »

If I remember rightly, FAT32 has a max partition size of 32GB in the M$FT world. That might be the problem - format her for NTFS and it should be OK.

Not possible because it's write protected !

But thanks anyway.

Fysh

If you don't have a hardware toggle on the drive to switch between writable and read-only, but the drive has started behaving as though it's read-only, chances are high it's a hardware issue.

You could try booting into a GParted Live disc or similar and see if that lets you perform any operations on it. If the fault behaviour persists, about all you can do is dispose of it.

Irishgoatman

bonzodog2 wrote: »

There's a free program to test USB sticks/SD card called H2testw
http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/System-Miscellaneous/H2testw.shtml
I have bought several cheap "32GB" uSD cards that have proved to only have ~7.5GB reliable storage.
I have another SD card, genuine I think, but only 1GB that I was using in a camera. A little while back it seemed to become read-only. So I just started using another card. More recently I tried "scan for errors" on the card from Win7; it found some error, and a picture I remember taking on another camera but had thought failed. Card is now writable.

Tried this prog but first it told me that the drive was write protected code 19 then it stopped running, not responding message.

I think the time has come to caress it with a hammer to be sure that no personal info is on it and relegate it to the bin.

Thanks for your input.

Irishgoatman

Many thanks for all the input but enough is enough.

The only reason I bought this drive was because the Saorview box I had at the time didn't have a hard drive, just a USB slot. Now that I've changed boxes this drive is surplus to requirements. If my memory serves me correctly, which is not always the case, it only cost me around 15 euro so no great loss.

Again, thanks everyone.

It's possible that the flash drive has reached its write cycle limit and went into write protect mode in order to prevent data loss due to unreliable flash memory. SSDs definitely do this.

CreepingDeath

If you don't care about the existing data, then try this

http://hddguru.com/software/HDD-LLF-Low-Level-Format-Tool/

It'll wipe the drive and has resurrected old USB keys for me in the past where all else failed, eg. trying to format with Windows, Partitioning tools etc.

goldenhoarde

Post some pics or the model or any writing identifying marks.

Check all around the device as there could be a write protect switch somewhere that's been hit. These can be small so have a close look all around