Write protected error in Sandisk Cruzer Blade

I have a Sandisk Cruzer Blade pen drive of capacity 16 GB. I had some data in it which is not so important so I wanted to format it. I wanted complete space to store some large amount of data. As soon as I clicked on format button, it gave me an error message saying that this device is write protected and it cannot be formatted. I am using Windows XP in which I am trying. Is there any way I can remove this error. I scanned my pen drive with anti-virus software, but no virus was found. Why is it happening, Can anybody tell me how to format pen-drive now?

I too have a Sandisk Cruzer Blade with me and it too suffers from same error as you have described. San Disk Cruzer Blade comes with Fat32 format by default from manufacturer. Due to this, you cannot copy or move data of more than size of 4 GB in the drive. If you try to copy more data, it will copy for the first time, but as soon as you remove the pen drive from the USB slot some mechanism gets activated which lock the pen drive and thus you see the write protected error. After I got this error, I plugged the pen drive in my friend’s laptop which has Windows Vista as operating system, there I formatted it into NTFS system and it never gave me write protected error message again.

Have you tried formatting the pens drive in Safemode? You should try; sometimes it really helps to solve these errors. From which PC are you trying to format the pen drive? If it is a school or office’s PC, then chances of pen drive working on it is less. It can be restricted according to the administrator’s policy implied on the computer. Also anti-virus or Spywares play a great role in denying or allowing access to edit data in external drives. Some anti-viruses detect it as a threat and stops users from editing it. In much system, anti-virus is set to start scanning the data for any malicious file as soon as an external device is detected. Maybe that is why you are not being able to format your pen drive.

If you are using your personal or Pc at your home and still it doesn’t allow you to attach the pen drive, then chances of the registry key being automatically edited is possible. In registry editor, find this key,
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\StorageDevicePolicies
In this key, edit the value of WriteProtect and set it to 0. This will waive all the restrictions on external devices that are attached to the PC. Many times some application automatically sets this value to 1 and that is why you need to change it back to default.

This problem occurs many times when someone just pulls out the pen drive without letting Windows allowing one to safely remove. Default way to remove a pen drive from system is to click on the green icon on system tray which gives option to safely remove the pen drive. After the option to remove the pen drive is used, it will show a message saying it is safe to remove the pen drive. When pen drive is forcibly removed it automatically starts the algorithm to protect the data from falling into wrong hands. To protect the integrity of data, it shows the write protected error.

If your pen drive has been affected due to direct removal, you can try changing the policy which will set the direct removal method as default method for unplugging the pen drive. Go in the properties of the pen drive, under hardware tab; find the name of your pen drive under which you will find policies. You can set default method for unplugging the pen drive from the USB slot.

I too have a similar problem with my pen drive, so I sent an email to the manufacturers. But still I haven’t received any reply which will prove useful to solve this problem. I was once told that SanDisk has pen drives are made to maintain such a level of security that a small change in policy can lead to locking of whole system.

The utility to format a drive runs under Windows. If you are having problems with this utility, then you can try updating this utility. Maybe your pen drive requires a newer version of this utility. You can also check if Windows security is not hampering with the working of pen drive. You can use applications like Magic Partition for formatting your pen drive. This software will format your drive and try writing data in it. If this fails then there is some problem with your OS.