How to Fix Write Protected Issue in Your Memory Card

Micro SD Memory Card / USB Drive (Pendrive) is Write Protected – How to Fix it ?

If you are facing a “Write Protected” error with your memory card or pendrive, then here’s a solution to fix it. Write protection is a feature which lets users to protect the content of a USB drive or SD / micro SD memory card. Using this feature, you can prevent other users from making modifications or changes to your memory card or pendrive.

If a storage device is write protected, then you won’t be able do delete content from it or format it completely. You’ll need to unlock it or remove the write protection to make changes to the device.
Although, the older SD cards or floppy disks came with a physical “Lock” button which enables users to write protect the storage device. The lock button is generally available in the left side of most of the SD cards, as shown below:

You can simply press that physical button to lock or unlock your SD card and enable or disable write protection on the go. But in case, if you are using a micro SD or micro SDHC card or a USB pen drive, and facing this write protection error, then you can try a few things as given below:

• Buy an adapter for your microSD or microSDHC memory card, which is having a lock button. Just insert the memory card into the adapter and toggle the lock button to remove write protection.
• Formatting the memory card or the pen drive may also remove write protection from your storage device. Although, you can’t simply format the drive through the format option once it’s write protected. You can either perform a format using Command Prompt (CMD) or through disk management. You can go to disk management by right clicking on the “Computer” button on your desktop or from the start menu, and select the “Manage” option from there. After that, go to “Disk Management” under the Storage tab in the left sidebar. Now right click on the desired storage drive and click on “Format”. That’s it. But note that formatting your card or USB drive will delete all the contents from the device.
• If you are still unable to fix it, try formatting it with HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool.

That’s it, I’m done with this simple guide of unlocking a write protected memory card or USB storage drive. If you are still facing this issue, then let us know the exact error you are confronting, we’ll try our best to get it fixed.
Further Reading: Best Tools to Create a Bootable USB Drive