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.
Sometimes it may seem difficult to
remember and follow the above mentioned steps each time you want
to enable/disable the write protection.
Hence as an alternative way,
there are many tools available to automatically enable/disable the
write-protection feature. Oneof the tool is USB Write Protect. . Using this tool you can limit write access to your USB
drives with just a click of a button. You can download this tool from
the following link: