Hard drive write protected.

[Albion]

I have a Windows XP x64 box that's giving me some problems with one of the external drives. The machine has 3 external USB drives 2 of which work just fine but one of the seems to be write protected. Whenever I try to move or create a file anywhere on the drive I get a "The media is write protected." error. The drive is formatted NTFS and has over 200gig free, and I see no permission problems.

Recently I had AVG 8.x find a virus in an archive on the drive and it seems that ever since then the drive is write protected. I had Evidence Eliminator installed on the machine. I thought maybe that was holding the drive write protected, when I removed the software everything seemed to be fine. I was able to create files. But a day later the drive was back to being write protected.

I've looked all over trying to find a way to remove the write protection but I can't find anything. None of my other external USB drives or internal drive are giving me any problems at all. I've looked at AVG and found nothing in it to suggest it's write protecting the drive. I've looked through all the properties pages and device manager and I can't seem to find anything at all wrong.

Other then AVG there are a few other programs installed (DVD Decrypter, 7zip, WinRAR, firefox, and VideoLAN). Does anyone know what might be keeping that drive write protected?

Thanks

 

[linney]

Maybe the Drive is just gone bad, have you been able to check it out from Recovery Console and ChkDsk /r?

I'd be inclined to uninstall AVG and then recheck the drive, re-install AVG and recheck the drive , scan the drive with AVG, recheck the drive once more.

Information about event ID 51

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q244780/

Can you do anything from Safe Mode with this drive?

The following thread mentions this Key for what it is worth?
Flopp write protection
thread779-1465850

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\StorageDevicePolicies\WriteProtect

DWORD value changed from 1 to 0, disable write protection.


Another thread had this comment, "Problem solved...somehow it got changed to "read only" in Bios settings".


In any case have you looked for any Bios updates or just for the hell of it, reset all the security access permissions back to day one defaults?

How to reset security settings back to the defaults

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/313222/#appliesto

Are these USB drives self Powered?

 

[BadBigBen]

You may need to Low Level Format the drive...
on the Apacer Website you can search for the USB utility called LFORMAT (not tried with USB HDD's but works for Flash Drives) and OnBelay software (google) should be able to lowlevel format a USB HDD...

before you do that, follow what Linney suggested and the following...

This talks about USB Flash drives, but should be similar:

USB Flash Drive Write protection

http://www.techspot.com/vb/topic18654.html

it could also be a drive letter assignment issue, in which case all you would need to do is change the Drive Letter:

1. Right-click My Computer, and then click Manage.
2. Under Computer Management (Local), click Disk Management.
3. In the list of drives in the right pane, right-click the flash drive and then click Change Drive Letter and Path(s).
4. Click Change, and in the drop-down box, select a drive letter for the new drive that is not assigned to a mapped network drive.
5. Click OK, and then click OK again.



Ben

"If it works don't fix it! If it doesn't use a sledgehammer..."

 

[Albion]

linney:

I'm not so sure it's a problem with the hardware. When I plugged the drive into my laptop, leaving the drive running, I could read and write from the drive no problem. Then when I reconnected it to my desktop it was back to read only. I'm kinda assuming it's a problem with the OS.

I am going to take your advice and uninstall AVG and try to reinstall it. I'm not 100% sure, but I did upgrade from AVG 7.5 to 8.0 during my disgnosis process on the machine. Maybe it was the change in version that made the drive work for that short time.

 

[CAPPBC]

Try this UNPNP tool. I had issues with flash drives not being accessible and ran this tool. Disable UPNP, restart then enable again and connect harddrive and let us know.

http://www.grc.com/UnPnP/UnPnP.htm

 

[avanderlaan]

Do you have a firewall other than Windows native running? Once by mistake I answered a Comodo firewall alert incorrectly and Comodo proceeded to write-protect the contents of an entire partition.