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I was using IntelliJ when my USB flash drive suddenly wasn’t being recognised and IntelliJ became unresponsive. I tried safely removing it but it wasn’t showing up there, so I force closed IntelliJ, plugged it out and plugged it back in and now the entire drive is read-only. Doesn’t appear to be corrupted. I can still access all my files. I just can't run any programs or write to any files without moving them off the drive.

I’ve tried changing the following value to 0 in regedit.exe. But I still get the error “The disk is write protected”.

Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\StorageDevicePolicies\WriteProtect

I’ve tried using diskpart to remove its Read-Only attribute, to which it responds “Disk attributes cleared successfully”, despite not recognising that it was read-only in the first place. But then when I try to clean the flash drive using it, it says:

DiskPart has encounted an error: The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error.

I’ve tried deleting its contents using diskmgmt.msc but when I right click it, its “Delete Volume” option is greyed out.

Is there anything I can do?

It’s a GOODRAM USB 3.0 64GB flash drive and I’m on Windows 8. Any other specs can be provided if needed.

DagdA
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1 Answers1

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When you say this:

Doesn’t appear to be corrupted. I can still access all my files. I just can't run any programs or write to any files without moving them off the drive.

The core of the issue—in my humble opinion—is you were using a USB flash drive as a workspace. And a non-cache/non-temp workspace. Meaning—depending on age and use—the drive itself could be dying or near dying. Articles like this one on ZDNet explain a bit of the logic behind USB flash lifespan. The article states this:

…all 3 drives handled more writes than they were spec’d for. For example, the cheap generic drive handled 77 million writes before failing.

More discussion the topic on this site:

If you simply write data to a USB flash drive and put it away in a safe place for 10 years, it will work again and all the data will still be there.

But if you continue to use it over and over again, it will definitely wear out eventually.

Now, I am not 100% sure of the cause of your failure, but it would seem to me that using it as a main drive for Java development might really stress out the write capacity of the device. And depending on the chips used, that lifespan can be shorter. But in general, the method of use you are engaging in with that USB drive is not what it’s designed to do.

My best advice to you is to copy all of the data off of that USB drive, attempt to format and repartition that USB flash drive and then see how it works. I would not recommend transferring the data back to the USB drive. Keep it on a real hard drive or perhaps use an SSD if you want the speed of flash storage.

But USB flash drives should just not be used as supplements to system disks. They should only be used for temporary storage.

Giacomo1968
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