How to Recover a Pen Drive from Write-Protected? ON WINDOWS

1. Diskpart Command

• Connect your flash drive to the computer, and launch a command prompt by searching for cmd.exe or “Command Prompt” in the Start menu.
• Type the following and press Enter after each command: diskpart, list disk, select disk #(# means the name of your write-protected disk), attributes disk clear read-only, clean, create partition primary, format fs=ntfs.

• Exit the Command Prompt.

After this, your USB flash drive should now work well.

2: Open Windows Explorer

• Plugin the write-protected disk.
• Press “Windows+E” and right-click on the drive.
• By right-clicking on the disk, you can choose “Properties”, and then select “Security”.

• To Edit the permissions, you should now select “Everyone” from “Group or user names”.
• Select “Edit” and go to “Permissions”
• Check all the boxes labeled as “Allow”
• Click “Apply” and exit. Your disk’s write protection has now been removed.

ON MAC

3: Format Write-Protected Pen Drive on Mac

To disable the write-protected disk on Mac, you can follow the next steps to format the drive on macOS:

• Open the Disk Utility, and the application window will open.
• Click on your USB flash drive on the left pane of Disk Utility.
• Click on the Erase tab, then select the format type. Select either “MS-DOS File System” or “exFAT” both working well on Windows and Mac.
• Then click on the “Erase” option to start formatting the USB flash drive.

4: Fix and Repair Permissions

Check if the drive’s permissions are corrupt or not. You can fix the error using Disk Utility. Follow the steps below to remove write protection from the Read-only USB drive on Mac.

• Go to the Disk Utility in the Utility folder.
• Select the device which is ready-only need to remove write protection.
• Click on the First Aid & the OS will start to scan your drive.

I hope those solutions could help you fix and remove write protection from USB drives on Windows and Mac. If it still fails to fix the problem, you should buy a new USB flash drive. Also, if you need to get all USB data back, you can download Recoverit Data Recovery, powerful USB data recovery software, to help you out. Follow the guide to recover files from a USB drive.