How to Write-Protect Your USB Flash Drive

Write Protect 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/Pendrives are so popular and most widely used to move data between computers, laptops and to our phones. They are the prime target for attackers as a means to spread the virus and infected files to the computer.

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. you can write-protect your USB flash drives is by enabling this feature on your own computer. How to write protect USB? You just have to read the given below step by step instructions to do it.

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Steps to Write Protect USB Drive

You can do it 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 (write protect USB) or disabled to allow write access.

  1. Open the Run dialog box and then you have to type regedit and press Enter.
  2. Now, It will open the Registry Editor on your screen.
  3. Navigate to the following Registry key:
    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\
  4. Create a New Key named as StorageDevicePolicies. To do this, right-click on Control, again click on New -> Key and name it as StorageDevicePolicies.
  5. Now right-click on  StorageDevicePolicies and create a New -> DWORD (32-bit) Value and name it as WriteProtect.
  6. 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 of 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.

write protect usb

To revert and remove the write-protection, all you need to do is just change the Value data for WriteProtect (Step-5) from 1 back to 0. Now write access to all the USB devices is re-enabled. There are many tools available to automatically enable and disable the write-protection feature. You can use this tool which is easy to do all these things and save your time.

 

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