Share via

Hard drive Locked as Read-Only

Anonymous
2010-09-11T17:41:55+00:00

Ive had this problem once before. I turned my PC on Yesterday, and my WD 500GB Hard drive (Number 3) was not recognised. Then I did a reboot, and the drive showed up again, HOWEVER, The drive has the Read Only flag in DiskPart and using the attrib disk clear readonly commands with the correct disk selected does not work. DiskPart just moans that It cant clear the attribute.

Any suggestions are welcome & Im willing to try anything. I doubt its a Driver Issue or a Hardware issue as It was working fine.

All the tests in Ubuntu 10.04 (my second os) come up good and I can write to it, So Windows 7 has done something, Not sure what.

Cheers,

Conor M

System Info

Asus P5N-D

Intel Pentium 4 @ 3.4GHz

2GB Ram

Seagate Barracuda 80GB IDE [System Drive]

Samsung 80GB SATA

WD Caviar Blue 500GB SATA [The drive in question]

Windows for home | Previous Windows versions | Windows update

Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.

0 comments

Answer accepted by question author

Anonymous
2010-09-13T21:49:50+00:00

Right, I have come across a fix! (at long last)

I hope this helps others as it helped me.

Open the disk properties and goto the Drivers tab

Uninstall the driver

Reboot your PC

When it starts up again, Log in and it should say that the device has been installed successfuly.

Reboot again (if windows doesnt tell you to)

Now its working perfectly.

Thanks for your help Amrita

Was this answer helpful?

30+ people found this answer helpful.
0 comments

Answer accepted by question author

Anonymous
2010-09-12T12:52:03+00:00

Hi,

What happens when you try to access the drive on Windows Explorer (do you get any error message)?

You may try to perform a check disk to check if there are any bad sectors on the hard drive which is not letting the hard drive to be detected and not allowing to change the attribute.

a)      Click on the start orb

b)      In the start seacr baox type ‘cmd’

c)      At the command prompt, type the following command, and then press ENTER:

Chkdsk /R X:

Note: In this command, X: is a placeholder that represents the drive letter of the volume that you want to check. 

d)      Press Y when you are prompted to check the disk the next time that the system restarts. 

e)      Close all applications, and then restart the computer.

Note: During the restart process, Windows checks the disk for errors, and then Windows starts. 

f)       After the computer restarts, repeat steps 1 through 4 for the other volume, and then rerun the backup operation. 

For more information follow the link given below. 

Check a drive for errors

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/Check-a-drive-for-errors

You may also try giving full permission to the hard drive and check if that helps. For more information follow the link given below.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/Windows7/What-to-know-before-applying-permissions-to-a-file-or-folder

Hope this information is helpful.

Amrita M

Microsoft Answers Support Engineer

Visit our Microsoft Answers Feedback Forum and let us know what you think.

Was this answer helpful?

6 people found this answer helpful.
0 comments

4 additional answers

Sort by: Most helpful
Most helpful Newest Oldest
  1. Anonymous
    2014-09-12T10:42:00+00:00

    Guy,

    Rly rly thank uuuu :)

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments
  2. Anonymous
    2013-11-07T02:57:08+00:00

    Thanks!!! Had this come up with an external drive (actually a drive I hooked up externally with a rig I have). For some reason the drive got locked as read only and I could not figure out how to fix it 'till I found this thread. Don't know why deleting the driver never occurred to me, but it didn't.

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments
  3. Anonymous
    2010-09-13T20:45:32+00:00

    Thanks for replying :)

    I have tried running chkdsk e: /r only to have cmd say I cant run the disk checking on this volume because its write protected.

    Ive now tried DiskPart, chkdsk and the Registry entry now.

    I do not get any errors from Windows Explorer at boot or when I open the drive. I only get errors from Steam because it cant write to its folder on the E: drive, and avast because It cant update itself.

    Thanks again for replying, Im grateful for anyone who helps me out :)

    Conor M

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments