Some times your USB drive or pen drive my face this serious problem, although the drive seems normal and is being detected by the OS, yet it shows the drive is write protected when you try to put some data on it.  I think now a days this is very common problem when using USB flash drives. Sometimes when you try to copy or delete files you get an error message “Remove the write-protection or use another disk”. It won’t allow you to format!

Different people following different tricks to solve this, like

Solution 1:

1. Open Start Menu –> Run, type regedit and press ok, this will open the registry editor.
2. Navigate to the following path:HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\
3. Now right click on Control folder –> Select New –> Key.
4. Now give the name as StorageDevicePolicies.
5. Now click on StorageDevicePolicies –> Go to right panel –> select New –> DWORD Value –>give the name as WriteProtect
   
6. Double-click it and set the value data as 1 (0 for disabling it).
   Note: Make sure that you are select the Base as Hexadecimal
7. Restart your PC that’s it.  Killing explorer.exe and restarting it will not do the job everytime.

Solution 2:

Click on Start.
Type diskmgmt.msc in Run.
In the disk management window, select the pen drive, right click on it and click on Format.  Now choose the File System and Allocation Unit Size.
Click on OK.

Solution 3: ( Professionals from str-Graphics )

Q: My Pen drive is not opening and formatting even after detecting by the Windows Os ?

Ans:

1. First insert your pen drive to your PC.
2. This time, you need Windows Xp CD inserted in the CD/DVD ROM, just boot from that CD.
3. Now walk normally up to choosing the disk drive to format..!
4. Generally we will format the C:/ but now instead of C:/ choose your pen drive, and format it.
5. Then it will starts copying the Xp files to pen drive, we dont need this so just restart your PC immediately. (Dont let the files copying to pendrive 1% to 3% is ok)
6. You are done! check your USB or pen drive now…