Issues with a USB drive?

So, I’ve got this USB drive, and since yesterday, it’s basically become a paperweight. I can't move anything onto it, and I can't even delete what's already there. It's just stuck.
Then, when I try to format the thing to start fresh, I get hit with that annoying "The disk is write protected" error message.
Does anyone here have any clue how to fix this headache?

Ran a week ago, I ran into the exact same thing..
I grabbed the Rufus tool and reformatted it from FAT32 over to NTFS, tweaked the drive label at the same time, and boom—it worked perfectly.
Trying to do it through Windows disk management was a total bust because it kept saying the drive was write-protected.

I'm lost here. Could you walk me through what I actually need to do?

So, did the block with the FAT table just kick the bucket?
Probably because of all that constant writing

Maybe try to salvage whatever’s left before just tossing it all in the trash

If that were actually the case, the computer wouldn't even be able to read the drive or show you a file list at all.

You just need to grab Rufus from the NET, fire it up, pick your drive (that USB stick), give it a name, set the format to NTFS, and run a quick fast FORMAT.
At least, that’s how I managed to bring my own thumb drive back from the dead recently.

The internal mechanism of a USB controller on a thumb drive is basically a black box

but based on how this kind of memory actually functions, it’s supposed to perform a full block CLEAR before writing to the FAT, and it should be checking the block STATUS first to see just how many write cycles it's already endured

I'd bet my life the controller decides the block can't RELIABLY handle another erase cycle
on the flip side, reading isn't destructive, so you can do that an infinite number of times

which is exactly why I’d just toss a drive like that straight into the trash

Some USB drives basically decide to go into "read-only" mode on their own—it’s when the device's internal controller realizes that any further writing will just corrupt everything. I’m about 90% sure that’s exactly what happened here; I actually dealt with a nearly identical situation in my own work recently. If the drive doesn't have a physical write-protect switch on the side, you can bet 😁 that you're looking at a hardware failure if a write-protect error pops up. You could try using Rufus, which helps in certain scenarios, but in my experience, it won't fix this kind of thing.

I’ve managed to "resurrect" about 20 memory sticks so far.
Some were easy fixes—just wiped the partition and started fresh—but others were total disasters because of bad connections or broken pins.

With FAT, you've got more than just filenames and extensions; the attributes and the start/end addresses for every fragment are actually written twice on the disk as a backup. So, if you wipe those specific blocks containing that data, there's nothing left on the drive to actually read.

Back in the day, you could usually clean up that kind of mess in the FAT table just by running a standard "chkdsk."

wearymason4 said:I’ve managed to "resurrect" about 20 memory sticks so far.
Some were easy fixes—just wiped the partition and started fresh—but others were total disasters because of bad connections or broken pins.

With FAT, you've got more than just filenames and extensions; the attributes and the start/end addresses for every fragment are actually written twice on the disk as a backup. So, if you wipe those specific blocks containing that data, there's nothing left on the drive to actually read.

Back in the day, you could usually clean up that kind of mess in the FAT table just by running a standard "chkdsk."

Look, if the stick is write-protected at the controller level, none of that matters. You can't do anything because the hardware itself refuses any changes—it's strictly read-only.
The diskpart method is only useful if you're dealing with a virus or some software glitch:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/
But again, that won't touch a hardware failure. In that case, the stick is permanently stuck in read-only mode. I've dealt with one of those before.

Morgan Ortiz6 said:I'm lost here. Could you walk me through what I actually need to do?

Do you happen to know which brand or manufacturer made the thumb drive?

I never said I didn't run into some that stayed stuck on "write protected" no matter what I tried. There were just fewer of them, even though a few were practically brand new—like, maybe only a week or two of use before they quit on me. 😢