How to Write-Protect Your USB Flash Drive
Many
a time, it becomes necessary for us to write protect our USB flash
drive so as to protect it from viruses and other malware programs.
Because flash drives are so popular and most widely used to move data
between computers, they are the prime target for attackers as a means to
get infections spread around the computer world. Also, since USB drive is not a Read-Only Memory (ROM), the data inside it can easily be modified or deleted by malware programs.
But unfortunately, most of the new flash drives do not come with a
write-protect feature as the manufacturers wish to cut down the cost of
production. Hence, the only way to write-protect your USB flash drives
is to enable this feature on your own computer.
This can be
done by adding a small entry to the Windows registry which acts as a
switch that can be enabled to make use of the write protection or
disabled to allow write access. Just follow these steps:
1. Open the Registry Editor (Open the “Run” dialog box, type regedit and hit “Enter”).
2. Navigate to the following Registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\
3. Create a New Key named as StorageDevicePolicies. To do this
right-click on Control, and click on New->Key and name it as
StorageDevicePolicies.
4. Now right-click on StorageDevicePolicies and create a New->DWORD (32-bit) Value and name it as WriteProtect.
5. Double-click on WriteProtect and set the Value data to 1.
Now the right-protection for USB drives is enabled on your computer (no
restart required) and thus it would not be possible for anyone or any
program to add/delete the contents from your USB flash drive. Any
attempt to copy or download the files onto the USB drive will result in
the following error message being displayed.
To revert and
remove the write-protection, all you need to do is just change the Value
data for WriteProtect (Step-5) from 1 back to 0. Now write access to
all the USB devices is re-enabled.
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