However, when it comes to a hard drive, things change, as there is no physical switch to toggle write-protection in hard drives. It helps protect the card from malware or virus infection and data loss. It’s a good practice to use write-protection switch on SD cards, and it does have a purpose. You may also use a third-party tool such as HDD LLF to low-level format the drive. Follow these steps to recover data from a corrupt and write-protected hard drive,Īfter data is recovered, use DiskPart or Disk Management tool to format the disk.
In case the drive is corrupt and inaccessible, use a data recovery software immediately as files cannot be read or written on the affected hard drive.
Close the Registry Editor window and reboot PC to apply all changes.Name it WriteProtect and set its value to 0.If WriteProtect is not visible, right-click on the white space and choose New>DWORD (32-bit) Value.Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE >System>Current Control Set>Control and click ‘StorageDevicePolicies’ĭouble-click on WiteProtect and change the value in the DWORD field to ‘0’.Open Registry to fix write protected error on USB, SD or internal/external hard drive.
How to Remove Write Protection from Diskįollowing these steps to remove write-protection from your Windows-based hard disk, To make it usable, you must remove write protection from the hard drive. Alteration in registry or permissions by user or malware/virusĪ write-protected hard drive allows you to access the data in it (if the drive is not corrupt), but you cannot write or paste new files and folders, which makes the drive literally unusable.
But before you head to solutions, here are a few common reasons that enable write-protection on a hard drive: Thus, if an external hard drive or internal drive volume becomes write-protected, you need to rely on Windows troubleshooting steps to remove the write-protection. However, unlike SD cards, there is no such switch to enable or disable write-protection in a hard drive.
Write-protection on SD card and some thumb drives can be turned ON or OFF by using an attached physical switch.