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I have an USB flash drive which is a gift from a company event. It was formatted into two partitions and one of it is locked to read-only. The company includes advertising documents in this partition. I would like to unlock it and return it into one good usb. I tried disk management utility, diskpart in cmd, but failed.

First I tried right-click format disk, and windows repond with "unable to complete the format".

Then I tried disk management utility but failed because of "write-protected usb".

Then I enter diskpart tried "clean", "create partition primary", "attributes disk clear readonly", "format FS=NTFS label=Data quick". "attribute disk" still tells me disk is in "read-only state" and "format" command failed due to media is write-protected.

mrr010
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2 Answers2

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As long as you don't have any sensitive information on the drive, you can boot into a Linux LiveCD, and image the disk with zeros if you want to be hardcore about it with:

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=4M status=progress

Where X is the number of your USB drive.

It's also simpler to just format it from a Linux LiveCD using a utility like GParted. Sometimes that does not work, if it doesn't, then it is best to just do the above.

If you do decide to format the drive with zeros, create a new partition table (GPT is the best) and create a new FAT32 (best for portability) partition or a new NTFS (if you're only using it for Windows) partition.

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if it's ready only, you can't format in anyway, but there's a trick and that's your chance if it works or not. I tried it and it worked for me on my Sony 16GB flash drive.most times usb get "ready only" if it's pulled out without ejecting properly or safely removing it from your OS.this enables hardware write protection of your usb. To remove this, plug usb and unplug it fast! yeah same wrong action should be repeated! remove not safely.hope in this way the write protection will be disabled.then go to formatting process through command line! good luck

lhodeniz
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