USB hard drive is write protected

[brewster]

Hi, tried your product and it worked a dream on another hard drive. I have another problem on an external hard drive, as follows -
I have a USB external hard drive My Passport 500 Gb[/color] that stopped working. Can't access in Disk Management (media is write protected)
I then try your HxD hex editor but it comes up with the same situation - I open disk and after a minute it says media is write protected. It shows up with complete set of zero's throughout.
Is there anyway of getting rid of the write protected component on this disk and if so how? If I can do this I might be able to initialize the disk in Disk Management?
I thank you for any replies

[Maël]

If disk managment cannot access your drive then HxD wont be able either, since it uses Windows functions to access the drive.

If you have an SD-Card it might be that the knob that sets the write protection has fallen off, you can use non-transparent tape to fix that, search the net for details. It may also be a loose cable or some hardware fault causing the problem.

As you say everything appears as zeros, the problem might be that your drive cannot be accessed properly. If connecting it to another PC gives the same results, check the cable/connector. It often happens in external drives that the connector gets loose (open the surrounding box of the drive to check that, not the drive's own enclosing!).

Hope that helps.

[brewster]

I really appreciate you taking the time to reply to me. It is actually a 3.5" external hard drive. Yes the connector wobbles loose but you can get it to work with the right angle. I did pull it out of its outer casing (plastic my passport) but still no luck. It is still under warranty but seeing I pulled it out of its casing I guess that nullifies the warranty. All I wanted to do was recover the data on it and I don't want to pay mega dollars to get this done.
I suppose I will have to concede defeat. If only I could bypass the stupid write protection system?
Thanks once again for you help
By the way, disk management function can access the drive but says it is write protected. Wish I could get past it.
Brewster

[hhache]

I had the same "write protected" problem.

1. I opened a cmd box,
2 entered "DiskPart"
3. then "list disk", noticed my problem drive was 1.
4. so entered "select disk 1" to make it selected
5. then "attributes disk clear readonly"

That did it, I was able to use HxD to change the value from 45 to 07 and save it. Worked great!

[Maël]

Thanks for the workaround!

Everyone who tries this, please note that HxD and diskpart count drives differently.

DiskNumber in HxD = drivenumber in diskpart + 1

That means:

drive 0 in diskpart is disk 1 in HxD
drive 1 in diskpart is disk 2 in HxD
drive 2 in diskpart is disk 3 in HxD
...

[sir-frac]

Hi, I'm trying to do that on a HD SATA inserted in a bay through USB; I did the disk part thingy but nothing changed.
It's still "read only".
Can you help?

Thanks

[Maël]

Not without more information.

[sir-frac]

What do you need to know?

Running win 7 64 bit, HD is formatted NTFS, I run the proggy as administrator...

[Maël]

Well, what is your problem exactly? A problem description of what you do and what you want to achieve would help.

Can you access it under Disk Management like the initial poster said, or do you get an access denied error when saving changes under HxD (which is another unrelated thing).
In the last case there are several forum posts about this problem. In short, you need to unmount the drive, as long as any file system is mounted on the disk you wont be able to write to the disk.

[sir-frac]

Thanks for your reply.
I plugged a SATA HD in a USB bay but the comp is seeing it as "invalid".

I can access it under Disk Management but cannot reactivate and if I chose to make it basic from there it warns me about deleting the content.
I need to be able to reach that content and tried to do it by changing that sector but the disk appears as "read only".
I used the diskpart and the prog says it's done but no real change is appreciated.

[Maël]

I am sorry, but since I hadn't a similar situation I don't know what you could do.
Maybe you can get more help in another forum.