How to enable or disable write protection on your USB drive???

USB drives are so popular and most widely used to move data between computers, they are the prime target for attackers to infect and  spread viruses or malware's 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. So write-protection is an option for USB's where you can disable writing option for your USB's,

USB drivers do not come with a write-protect feature by default . Hence, the only way to write-protect your USB drives is to enable this feature on your own computer.

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.

Enabling the write protection :- 

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. Create a New Key named as StorageDevicePolicies. To do this right-click on Control, and click on New->Key and name it as StorageDevicePolicies.

4. Now right-click on  StorageDevicePolicies and create a New->DWORD (32-bit) Value and name it as WriteProtect.

5. Double-click on WriteProtect and set the Value data to 1 

.

Now the write-protection for USB drives is enabled on your computer  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 error message . 

Disabling Write Protection :-

For Disabling the write protection on your computer disable just change the WriteProtect value to 0 . 

Posted in: Tutorials