Random write protect of hard disks

Anonymous
2010-06-20T06:45:55+00:00

I have what appears to be a relatively common problem but as yet have seen no answer. My system randomly write protects one of my hard disk volumes & will not clear it until reboot. My configuration is as below

My system drive has 2 partitions, C: & D: (plus 100mb partition for Windows?) & my second drive has 4 partitions, E: F: Y: Z: Any one of the drives can become write protected although I don't recall having the problem on C:

Asus M3A78-T

AMD 7750 CPU

4 G RAM

2 x WD 320G HDD RAID 1 (System)

2 x SGate 500G HDD Raid 1 (Data)

RAID Controller is AMD 750 on MBoard.

Initially I upgraded to Win7 Ultimate x64 from Vista x64 Pro in situ, but due to minor but annoying problem did a fresh install to Win7 x64 at which time I set up the RAID's.

Under Vista x64 I had 2 x 320's as single drives.

I don't know if I had this problem with Vista.

I have many references to this problem around the Net & there appears to be no common hardware factor. . .only OS. . .Vista or Windows 7.

Some help would be greatly appreciated.

Windows for home | Previous Windows versions | Devices and drivers

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  1. Anonymous
    2010-06-21T11:29:48+00:00

    I tried your suggestion but it has had no effect. In your instructions I assumed that if I had no StorageDevicePolicies Key that I should create one. I then assumes I should create a DWORD called WriteProtect & set it to 0.

    Currently my Drive Z: is Write Protected. Drive Z: is my Virtual Memory Drive (Swap Drive). When Windows started it said it could not use it & created it own.

    Chinga

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  2. Anonymous
    2010-06-21T10:55:39+00:00

    Thanks for your reply Ajay K.

    What alerted me was not being able to open a MS Word attachment in Outlook. When I tried to open it I got a message that I was unable to read it due to the document being write protected by another user. . .I have no other users. That caused me to think about a situation a couple of days earlier when MS Outlook could not get access to my .pst file. I then had a situation where I wasn't able to save a graphic I had created.

    The upshot is that I found I wasn't able to write to various drives, the drive varied & was cleared after reboot but then the problem was with a different drive.

    I will try your fix the next time the problem presents itself & report the results.

    There currently is no StorageDevicePolicies key in my registry.

    Kind regards

    Chinga

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  3. Anonymous
    2010-06-26T06:49:17+00:00

    Thanks for your reply Scar-face. Would you believe today is the first day since install that I haven't had the problem on any drive. Yesterday I did two things:

    1. Installed a discreet graphics card instead of using On-board HD3300.
    2. Disable ALL DRIVE INDEXING.

    Item 2 is interesting because I don't believe I've experienced this problem with any of my previous installs. . .XP, Vista or Win7 & disabling Drive Indexing is normally one of the 1st thinks I do after an Install.

    It will be interesting to see if the problem is gone for good. . .I'll let you know.

    Kind regards

    Chinga

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  5. Anonymous
    2010-06-21T01:15:55+00:00

    Hi Chinga,

    How did you obtain the information that your hard drive is write-protected?

    Step 1: You can remove write protection from your Hard drive using the below method:

    1.   Open start menu, in the search bar type  regeditand press enter. This will open the registry editor.

    Navigate to the following path:

    2.   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\StorageDevicePolicies

    Note: If the registry key StorageDevicePolicies does not exist, you will need to create it manually.

    3.   Double click the key  WriteProtect in the right window and set the value to0 in the Value

    4.   Data Box and press OK button

    5.   Restart your computer and then test.

    Important This section, method, or task contains steps that tell you how to modify the registry. However, serious problems might occur if you modify the registry incorrectly. Therefore, make sure that you follow these steps carefully. For added protection, back up the registry before you modify it. Then, you can restore the registry if a problem occurs. For more information about how to back up and restore the registry, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

    How to back up and restore the registry in Windows XPhttp://support.microsoft.com/kb/322756/

    Note: You may want to check the hard drive documentation for write-protection settings.

    Thanks and Regards:

    Ajay K

    Microsoft Answers Support Engineer

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