Regain Control of Your Hard Drive
By Anderton |
Is Windows saying your drive is protected, or you can’t override security attributes, and you’re stuck in “read-only” land? File this hot tip for future reference and save yourself frustration
by Craig Anderton
From time to time, for reasons unknown to mere mortals, Windows will arbitrarily prevent you from writing to a hard drive because it says the drive is write-protected, or some other such error message. This seems to happen mostly to external USB drives (like what you use for storing audio, samples, etc.) and figuring out a solution isn’t obvious—no matter what you do in the drive's "Security" tab, nothing seems to work. Fortunately, there’s an easy fix (this assumes you have administrator privileges).
Click on the start button, and type CMD.EXE in the search box. A command line prompt opens.
Type diskpart then enter (note: what you need to type is shown in yellow for clarity).
Type list volume then enter.
You’ll see a list of drives, each with a number. Type select volume # (in this case, it was volume 7), then enter.
Type attributes disk clear readonly then enter.
When you see “Disk attributes cleared successfully,” you’re done. Close the command prompt box, and now you can write with impunity to your formerly locked drive.
Craig Anderton is Executive Editor of Electronic Musician magazine and Editor Emeritus of Harmony Central. He has played on, mixed, or produced over 20 major label releases (as well as mastered over a hundred tracks for various musicians), and written over a thousand articles for magazines like Guitar Player, Keyboard, Sound on Sound (UK), and Sound + Recording (Germany). He has also lectured on technology and the arts in 38 states, 10 countries, and three languages.
Recommended Comments
There are no comments to display.