Norman Conley asks:
I have a Toshiba 750 GB external hard drive, my PC has stopped recognizing it, so I hooked it to my Macbook Pro. It took a couple of hours but it mounted. I tried to format it to FAT32 using my Mac, it said it formatted the hard drive successfully, but my then my Mac stopped recognising it.
I tried it with my PC again, Windows 7 recognized it, but said it needed to be formatted before it could be used. When I tried to format it with Windows 7, it said the hard drive was write protected. How do I remove the write protection? Can I force the MacBook to mount the hard drive and remove the write protection? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!
Browser: Chrome 21
System: Mac
Tagged: external hard drive, fat32, mac tips, microsoft windows, write protection
System: Mac
Tagged: external hard drive, fat32, mac tips, microsoft windows, write protection
12 Answers -
ferdinan Sitohang
August 28, 2012Please Follow this step techiecorner
Bruce Epper
August 28, 2012Try this one: open an administrative command prompt and type ‘diskpart’ and press Enter. Next, type ‘list volume’ and press Enter. This will list all volumes attached to the system. Find your external drive and note the number, you need it for the next command. Now, type ‘select volume #’ replacing the # with the number you got from the previous step. It should respond with ‘Volume # is the selected volume’. Next, type ‘attributes disk clear readonly’. This will clear the read-only attribute for the disk (if it is set). You could also just type ‘attributes disk’ to see the current state of all attributes for the disk (the top 2 are the ones you are concerned with). If they are set (have a value of ‘Yes’), you need to run the clear command to remove that setting. Type ‘exit’ to close the diskpart tool, then ‘exit’ again to close the command prompt. Reboot your system to force a remount of the drive with the new settings and you should be able to fully access the drive.
Benjamin Glass
August 28, 2012Don’t use FAT32; use NTFS. This might solve some of your problems.
FIDELIS
August 28, 2012Hello, you could also try clearing the write protection on the registry. If you want to try by using the registry option, I would recommend to backup registry first. Here are the steps:
– click on start and then type regedit in search box:
– once registry open, navigato to the following entry:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\StorageDevicePolicies
If for some reason the StorageDevicePolicies entry does not appear, make sure to create a new entry for one
– click on storageDevicePolicies to hightlight it and then create a new DWORD (32-bit) Value named as WriteProtect.
– Once WriteProtect entry is created, double click on WriteProtect key in the right hand side window and set the value to 0 in the Value Data Box and press OK button
– restart your system
– try to copy/delete files in your external drive
Tony Batty
August 30, 2012Norman, right click My Computer, go to Manage, in the Computer Management Screen, go to Disk Management, look for the drive in the right pane windows and do what Ben says format in the NTFS format, by right clicking on the drive and choosing format, you will see other options there too.
Ashok Sundar
August 30, 2012You have to go back to FAT32 filesystem, I mean to say use previous version Windows & remove the write protection and backup your data to NTFS version.
vivek yadav
October 2, 2012format it again…
Kavita
October 6, 2012format it again using disk utility….
Bodi Hemanth
October 11, 2012You can format your external hard disk for Mac and Window. To format hard disk that usable for Mac and Windows, you need to select “MS DOS File System” for formating your hard disk.
To format your hard disk for Mac and Windows on Mac follow the steps below:-
Go to Finder -> Application -> Utilities
Double click for Disk Utility
Select the external Hard Disk you wish to format at the left column
Click on the Erase tab
At the “Volume Format” select “MS-DOS File System”
If you confirm to format your hard disk for mac and windows, Click on “Erase” button.
Pop up window will ask to verify the erase procedure. Click the erase button again in the window to start the erase process.
* All the data in the external hard disk will be permanently removed after this steps.
Once the erase process finish, your external hard disk may be able to use in Mac and Windows.
P/S: This tutorial is also suitable for format thumb drive to be used on Mac and Window.
Norman Conley
October 16, 2012Many thanks to all those who left comments, and suggested ways for me to recover my external hard drive. I was able to solve my problem. I right clicked on My Computer, and selected Manage, then I selected Disk Management. I wasn’t able to format the hard drive, so I right clicked on it and selected Delete Volume. Then I created a new volume, and was able to format it. Thanks again everyone for helping me find a solution.
bright awotwe
January 12, 2013I was firstly using my 4gb pendrive which was working effectively .i use to plug it in my my playstation 3 and my pc and do some installation but within a few days later, any time i want instal any file, it says there is right protecting and with this right i cant even formate because any time i try it still displays this right.please i am pleeding please help me.
Did you tried above listed solutions?
February 2, 2013I was able to delete the volume, create a new one and reformat the drive. I lost a lot of files, but the drive works now…… Thanks
February 7, 2013Anish Parameshwaran
February 11, 2013I’d recommend reformatting the hard drive to NTFS, since it has been known to be more stable.
I did format it for NTFS. Thank you.
February 17, 2013