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Cannot remove Write Protection from Internal Hard Drives all attempts have failed

Anonymous
2023-06-19T22:17:07+00:00

In rebuilding my computer, I have had nothing but issues.

I lost all my documents (the My Documents folder became a shortcut that went nowhere, was told it was pointing to my OneDrive, but no). I have accepted that everything I have saved for 20 years is gone. I am just living with it.

I have three hard drives in my system. 2 SSD and 1 SATA. The main hard drive is fine. The other two are completely formatted. But I can do nothing with them, as they are listed as write protected.

I have done diskpart, which did nothing.

Bitlocker is turned off on all drives, no change.

I have downloaded third party software which was supposed to fix it, and that did nothing.

I have updated my registry, adding the StorageDevicePolicies which did nothing.

When these hard drives were in my Windows 10 machine, they were fine. They worked. They did not give issues. Now that they are blanked, and ready for use, I cannot do anything with them.

This is a Windows 11 Pro machine.

Is there anything else I can try? I'm at a standstill with these drives, and it is a waste of 1.5TB.

Windows for home | Windows 11 | Files, folders, and storage

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  1. Anonymous
    2024-06-04T21:01:52+00:00

    The Bitlocker is definetely the issue. Even when I was creating a dev drive through the settings it still didn't allow the drive to be modified, only through turning it off and on again I managed to get the Bitlocker window asking me to encrypt.

    Thank you guys, this was the one for me.

    3 people found this answer helpful.
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  2. Anonymous
    2024-05-23T12:35:26+00:00

    Follow these steps:

    1. Open Command Prompt as Administrator.
    2. Run the command "diskpart". You'll enter into the Diskpart environment.
    3. Run the command "list disk". ...
    4. Run the command "select disk <index_number>" ...
    5. Run the command "attributes disk clear read only" to clear the read-only status.
    3 people found this answer helpful.
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  3. Anonymous
    2024-03-21T08:41:44+00:00

    Son of a goose, I was acttually being able to remove the write protect by doing regedit and local group policies but I don't know which one worked. but then when I restart my pc couple of times the write protect is back and I'm sick of this ****.

    3 people found this answer helpful.
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  4. Anonymous
    2024-02-02T20:45:04+00:00

    Hey there.

    Is there a solution? Well, I did find one.

    Will you like it? No.

    The biggest issue I had was that inside Windows, it said they were write-protected. In the command prompt, they weren't. The conversation between the two sides were totally at conflict.

    And by this point, I had already formatted harddrives and the like. And despite having OneDrive, I lost YEARS of files, because the sync being used was from my laptop, and not my desktop, so the "Desktop" which was supposed to be on my drive, was actually a link that went nowhere.

    I fixed it when I replaced the main harddrive, and bought another copy of Windows, this time the Home version instead of Pro. As Home does not have BitLocker running at the start, it doesn't see the drives as locked. I lost Gigs of pictures, music, and memories. Make sure everything you want is properly backed up. But yeah, I basically had to start from scratch. It sucks, but it worked.

    Good luck.

    3 people found this answer helpful.
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  5. Anonymous
    2023-06-19T23:49:20+00:00

    Hi, I am Dhanam, Independent Advisor here to work with you on this issue.

    I know this has been difficult for you, Rest assured, I'm going to do my best to help you.

    Type “regedit” in the Run dialogue.

    Navigate to the path below: Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\StorageDevicePolicies.

    Double-click WriteProtect and Change the value data from 1 to 0.

    Close Regedit Editor and check whether the write protection is removed.

    This is a public user-to-user support forum. I'm a user like you helping other users. I do not work for Microsoft and cannot access any user accounts.

    I hope this can help you. If this still can't solve your problem, just let me know and I'll do my best to try to help you.

    Regards,

    Dhanam,

    Independent Advisor.

    3 people found this answer helpful.
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