# Write-protected USB drive



## eruditium (Sep 19, 2011)

I was trying to mount an ISO to an 8gb SanDisk Cruzer flash drive, using a Windows 7 x64 computer. All of the programs I had tried said there was something wrong with the ISO. I didn't think so at the time, as I could browse the contents just fine in WinRAR, but I guess it may be more complicated that that (and who am I to disagree with several Windows applications?). Anyway, a few webpages recommended using xcopy, so I formatted the flash drive (H:\), mounted the ISO to a virtual drive (I:\) and entered in the console:

>xcopy I:\*.* H:\ /s/e/f

The process was going fine until xcopy stopped with the indication that the drive was write-protected. It's still write-protected and I can't do anything with it. I don't know how this could have happened, but all I want now is to remove the write-protection so I can copy the ISO to my Linux computer and mount it to the flash drive from there.

Microsoft Support recommends using the console to remove the read-only attribute, but that doesn't seem to work:

>attrib -r +s H:\
File not found - H:\

I tried formatting the flash drive in Linux but that didn't work either:

$ sudo fdisk -b 4096 /dev/sbd1
Unable to open /dev/sdb1
$ sudo mkfs.ext3 /dev/sbd1
/dev/sdb1: Read-only file system while setting up superblock

Many flash media have physical switches to make the drive read-only, but this one has no such switch (at least, that I can see).

So, my questions are: what made the flash flash drive read-only in the first place? and more importantly, how can I make it writable again?


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## pip22 (Aug 22, 2004)

Solution to remove Write Protection from USB Pen Drive - Tech Salsa


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## eruditium (Sep 19, 2011)

None of the solutions in the article have worked for me. The low-level format tool gives format errors every 65536 bytes for the length of the flash drive. The problem is starting to look unfixable--will I have to buy a new flash drive?


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