 What is "write protection" on USB disks?

 Causes of USB write-protected error

 How to add write protect to a flash drive?
 How to remove write protection from read-only USB drive?
o Solution 1: Check the drive for a physical lock
o Solution 2: Disable write protection in Registry
o Solution 3: Use Command Prompt to remove write protection
o Solution 4: Check account permission
o Solution 5: Make sure the USB drive isn't full
o Solution 6: Ensure your USB drive is free from virus
o Solution 7: Format the disk write-protected disk
o Solution 8: Verify bad sectors
 How to recover data from write-protected flash drive?
o Free download flash drive data recovery software
o Steps to recover data from write-protected flash drive

What is "write protection" on USB disks?

Write protection on USB flash drives or SD cards is a handy function aiming to

prevent accidental file deletion and block suspicious files like virus and un-
authorized sources. External data storage devices are very common devices and they
are widely used these days, as they are portable and users can take them anywhere
they want. When a USB disk is write-protected, it turns into read-only. In that case,
any action to add or edit data into that disk will be denied. All attempts related to
writing action will be prevented, such as add or create new file, edit existing data,
delete files that already present, formatting current USB disk, etc. Another reason
people only give readable access to their storage device is to prevent others from
sharing content stored on the disk.
When you try to write data to such disk you'll get error message "The disk is write-
protected. Remove the write-protection or use another disk." as shown in the picture
below.

However, this feature may become a headache if it is not properly used or USB drive
is corrupted. In that case, the error "The disk is write protected" will drive you crazy,
as you can't access data on that USB drive and the only option to fix it might be
format write-protected USB complete, which won't be an easy job. What's worse, if
files on that drive are important to you, formatting won't be a wise choice, for
formatting wipes data. Thus you need to disable or remove write-protection from
USB disk first. Let's look at a real case found from a forum:

"I recently bought a new laptop that installs Windows 10. I have four USB flash
drives and one of them is now marked 'write-protected' for no reason, as I didn't do
anything to it. I found a solution for windows XP and tried on my own computer. But
it didn't remove write protection. I just want to copy files from the USB disk to
computer and then reformat it. Can you help me on the write protection removal
thing on Windows 10 computer or retrieve data?"