How to remove write protect from external hard drive

Question

How to remove write protect from external hard drive

Anonymous

I have several external hard drives that have suddenly become write protected.I have attempted to remove the write protection through formatting the disk which could not be done brcause of the write protection. I attempted to remove the write protection using the Diskpart Command Prompt option to no avail.

In registry I added a new DWORD, WriteProtect to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\StorageDevicePolicies, settimng its value to "0" which did not work.

I am running

Wimndows 10 64 bit Pro

Version 22H2

OS Build 19045.4529

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.

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Answer 1

Hi ,

I'm Dyari. Thanks for reaching out. I will be happy to assist you in this regard.

Some external hard drives have a physical switch to enable/disable write protection. Make sure this switch is set to allow writing.

Also, make sure you run the correct commands with Diskpart:

Diskpart

list disk

select disk X (Replace X with the number of your external disk)

attributes disk

attributes disk clear readonly

exit

Please let me know if you need further assistance and keep me updated.

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How to remove write protect from external hard drive

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