HOW TO WRITE PROTECT AND REMOVE WRITE PROTECTION FROM A DRIVE

               HOW TO WRITE PROTECT AND REMOVE WRITE PROTECTION FROM A DRIVE

How to Write-Protect Your USB Flash Drive

Many a time, it becomes necessary for us to write protect our USB flash drive so as to protect it 
from viruses and other malware programs. As flash drives are so popular and most widely
used to move data between computers, they are the prime target for attackers as a means
 to get infections spread around the computer world. Also, since USB drive is
 not a Read-Only Memory (ROM), the data inside it can easily be modified or 
deleted by malware programs.

But unfortunately, most of the new flash drives do not come with a write-protect feature
 as the manufacturers wish to cut down the cost of production. Hence, the only way to write-protect
 your USB flash drives is to enable this feature on your own computer.

Steps to Write-Protect Your USB Drive:

This can be done by adding a small entry to the Windows registry which acts
 as a switch that can be enabled to make use of the write protection or
 disabled to allow write access. Here we go:

1. Open the Registry Editor (Open the “Run” dialog box, type regedit and hit “Enter”).
2. Navigate to the following Registry key:
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\
3. Now right-click on  StorageDevicePolicies and create a New ->
   DWORD (32-bit) Valueand name it as WriteProtect.
4. 
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   Double-click on WriteProtect and set the Value data to 1.
   Now the right-protection for USB drives is enabled on your computer
    (no restart required) and thus it would not be possible for anyone or any program
    to add/delete the contents from your USB flash drive. Any attempt to copy or 
   download the files onto the USB drive will result in the following error message being displayed.
   

To revert and remove the write-protection, all you need to do is just change the
 Value data forWriteProtect (Step-5) from 1 back to 0. Now write access to all the USB devices is re-enabled.

Sometimes it may seem difficult to remember and follow the above mentioned steps
 each time you want to enable/disable the write protection. Hence as an alternative
 way, there are many tools available to automatically enable/disable the write-protection 
feature. One of my favorite tool is USB Write Protect

Using this tool, you can limit write access to your USB drives with just a
 click of a button. You can download this tool from the following link:

USBWriteProtect

I hope you’ve now understood how to enable or disable write-protection
 of USB devices on your computer.