When you receive the error The disk is write protected, it means you tried formatting your Pendrive but were not able to. This may be due to external software or encryption that was probably used to lock the contents of the Pendrive and the contents within the drive are read only.

In this case, the computer does not allow you to format, edit, or modify contents of the Pendrive in any way. There are some ways to get around this problem and completely erase the contents of the Pendrive.

Also, once you finish the necessary process, the Pendrive will be empty and open to modification and editing of all kinds. Before proceeding further, please check if your Pendrive has a switch at the side to enable its lock protection.

If so, simply toggle the switch to off and the write protection is gone. Click Start or the windows icon on the bottom left corner, type: Regedit in the search box, click Regedit.exe to open the Registry editor when you see it is displayed at the top of the list.

Please note, if you can’t find the StorageDevicePolicies Folder, then right-click the Control folder and create a new policy by right clicking it. Name it StorageDevicePolicies without spaces and create a new DWORD as WriteProtect.

Make sure the value data field is marked as 0. Now double click to open it and change the value data to 0. Now quit this screen and your Pendrive is ready to format like you normally do using right click >format.

Connect the USB drive to the system and launch the Command Prompt application from the Start menu. Once it is launched, enter the Diskpart command to launch the utility tool. Enter the list disk command to view the attached drives.

From here, identify the disk identifier from the list to fix anything. Now, you need to pick your USB drive using the select command followed by its identifier. The identifier is the name of the disk as recognized by your PC.