On one of my recent trips I had an issue with my jump drive that had my PortableApps installed on it. The issue was when I plugged in the drive it would begin to load up and then throw an error about the drive being write protected. I proceeded with the usual troubleshooting of unplugging it and plugging it back in, still no luck. Step two was to cuss at it which didn’t work either. After a little bit of digging I found a few solutions.

The first solution talked about using a utility from Verbatim which would allow you to adjust the write protection. The only problem with this one is that you had to install the utility on the jump drive. This was obviously not going to be the solution in my case.

The second solution which ultimately fixed my problem was to jump into the registry and fix it manually. Now before you proceed our disclaimer is that you proceed at your own risk. Editing the registry incorrectly can make your computer useless.

Just do a “regedit” for StorageDevicePolicies key

1. Get into the Registry - Press Start -> Run, enter regedit, press Ok
2. Click on My Computer. Then press File -> Export, give some file name to backup the registry. Just incase you ever need to rollback.
3. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Control/StorageDevicePolicies
4. In the right pane select “writeprotect”
5. RESET the value to ‘0′
6. Repeat the same for ControlSet001 and ControlSet002 incase they exist.

Now plug in your USB drives and it should work. If it doesn’t reboot the machine and try again. This worked perfectly for me and hopefully for you as well.

Filed under: Hardware, Tips and Tricks, jump drive, windows, write protection