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

Question

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.

Answer 1

Hi,

I fixed this by going into disk manager and disabling the write cache policy. I then took the disk offline and bought it back online. This disabled the write protection.

Hope this helps.

Cheers

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

Appreciate your assistance on this.

As mentioned in the initial problem, I indicated that I had updated the registry, adding the StorageDevicePolicies, which included adding the WriteProtect.

This has been done, and it did not work.

Any other options?

I have done diskpart which did not work.

I updated the registry which did not work.

Bitlocker is turned off.

Third party software has not worked.

Answer 4

Use the System File Checker tool to repair missing or corrupted system files using this link: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/use-t...

Answer 5

Use the System File Checker tool to repair missing or corrupted system files using this link: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/use-t...

Thanks for your reply. Unfortunately that too did not work.

I can officially say that on these two hard drives that were perfectly fine, I have now done the following with no changes:

Used the System File Checker

Done Disk Part

Updated the registry

Verified that Bitlocker is turned off

Used Third Party Software

I have also deleted the partitions on the drive, removed the drive letter, rebooted the machine, created a new partition on the drives, and still get the write protection issue.

This has not been fun.