👨‍💻 How to Unlock a Write Protected USB Drive, a SD or Micro SD Memory Card or a Hard Drive in 2021
Channel: Hetman Software: Data Recovery for Windows
Date: 2017-03-16

👍 Watch how to unlock a USB drive, a SD or Micro SD memory card or a hard drive when it has write protection enabled. If you get the message “The disk is write-protected“ when copying files or formatting a device, don’t hurry to throw it away. Let’s see what can be done in such a situation.

Recovering Data From RAW Flash Drive or Memory Card (SD, MicroSD): https://hetmanrecovery.com/recovery_news/recovery-of-raw-flash-drives-memory-cards-sd-microsd.htm

Content:
0:00 - Intro;
0:34 - Unlocking a write
1:43 - Cleaning and formatting the disk

You can get similar error messages when working with a computer or laptop, as well as with a mobile phone, tablet PC, TV or car audio. Do the following to remove write protection:
1. Some models of flash drives, memory cards and external drives can have switches to enable write protection. Most often you can find such switches in SD cards. Examine the device carefully and check the position of the switch (if there is any).

2. Your device may be infected by a virus blocking your attempts to write or format the drive. Check the device with an antivirus and clean it if necessary.

3. Unlock the device by using the command prompt:
a. Launch the Command prompt as Administrator. 
b. Type in the command “Diskpart” and press Enter.
c. Type in “list disk” and press Enter.
d. Find the drive number corresponding to your flash drive, memory card or hard drive. When doing it, the drive size will help you. Type in “select disk” and the number of the disk that corresponds to the device and press Enter.
e. Type in “attributes disk clear readonly” and press Enter. This will unlock the device for writing.


We also recommend cleaning and formatting the drive for further use. Take the following steps only if the drive contains no important data.

a. Type in “clean” and press Enter - it will delete all data on this drive including service information.
b. Type in “create partition primary” and press Enter - it creates a new partition.
c. Then type in “select partition 1” and press Enter.
d. Type in “active” and press Enter, and the new partition will become active.
e. Then type in “format fs=fat32 quick” and press Enter - it will format the device in FAT32 format.
f. After that, type in “assign” and press Enter to give the flash drive a letter name.

When you did it, try creating a file or folder on the flash drive. As we can see, protection has been removed successfully. 
If this advice didn’t help you, watch our previous videos about fixing flash drive errors.
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