118

I have a USB which is write protected:

dmesg | tail

[10098.126089] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is on
[10098.126098] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 23 00 80 00
[10098.126779] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdb] No Caching mode page present
[10098.126788] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
[10098.131418] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdb] No Caching mode page present
[10098.131425] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
[10098.133335]  sdb: sdb1
[10098.135509] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdb] No Caching mode page present
[10098.135515] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
[10098.135521] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI removable disk

How can I turn the write protection off?

What I've tried

  1. Checked if it has a hardware switch - no
  2. Tried to format it on windows and on Linux (via terminal too)
  3. Tried fdisk | chmod
  4. Tried to fix this with several tools from Ubuntu software center
  5. Used Google and have seen about 10,000 discussions about this problem but they were never solved

Additional information

fsck -n /dev/sdb1

fsck from util-linux 2.19.1
dosfsck 3.0.9, 31 Jan 2010, FAT32, LFN
There are differences between boot sector and its backup.
Differences: (offset:original/backup)
  65:01/00
  Not automatically fixing this.
Free cluster summary wrong (968250 vs. really 911911)
  Auto-correcting.
Leaving file system unchanged.
/dev/sdb1: 50 files, 93653/1005564 clusters

fdisk -l

   Device  boot.   Start        End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1            32     8060927     4030448    b  W95 FAT32

umount /dev/sdb1

mkfs -t vfat /dev/sdb1

mkfs.vfat 3.0.9 (31 Jan 2010)
mkfs.vfat: unable to open /dev/sdb1
25
  • 8
    I can't format it because of write protection.
    – noob
    Feb 17, 2012 at 17:21
  • 2
    @micha - what kind of USB device is it - obviously you've checked if it has a hardware switch? any errors if you attempt to mount it? sudo mount /dev/sdb1 -v ?
    – fossfreedom
    Feb 17, 2012 at 18:00
  • 1
    micha, fair enough. Have you tried running efsck or used Ubuntu's Disk Utility to check the health status of the flash disk? If it was working fine & then stopped working all of a sudden there could be a hardware malfunction.
    – kingmilo
    Feb 18, 2012 at 8:53
  • 2
    @kingmilo e2fsck : Bad magic number in super-block while trying to open /dev/sdb1 SuperBlock is not readable.
    – noob
    Feb 18, 2012 at 16:42
  • 1
    @micha - very well, still doesn't mean it's not faulty though unfortunately. It's common for storage devices to appear to work normally when in fact they are faulty, just at a different stage of faulty. I think with all the activity on this question you should ask for small donations to replace the drive, it would be easier 😜
    – kingmilo
    Feb 18, 2012 at 17:34

9 Answers 9

105

To turn off disk device`s write protect, we use the low level system utility hdparm like this:

sudo apt-get install hdparm    
sudo hdparm -r0 /dev/sdb

where we asume that /dev/sdb is the Physical disk device we're working on. If the device has partitions that are mounted as read-only, you should re-mount 'em as read-write in order to write data to them.

Hope that helps.

13
  • 4
    You can find the explanation by typing that command here > explainshell.com
    – sugab
    Jul 19, 2015 at 5:31
  • 121
    it shows readonly = 0 (off) but still i'm not able to write or format. Apr 11, 2016 at 6:26
  • 2
    @OP I had the same as you, which is: sdxc card mounted read-only whatever the computer; hdparm -r shows "1 - on" then after unlocking with r0: "0 - off" but mount read-only anyway. But mounting my SanDisk sd card in another adapter and I couuld mount it rw. It turns out two of my microSD-to-SD adapters have a broken pin between two connectors. And these two will mount read-only whatever I do. Kuddos to @Angel_Genchev he answer has the most command in it.
    – tuk0z
    Aug 25, 2016 at 16:02
  • 3
    @lliseil It's more than likely the reader's write protect switch is being pressed upon by the card inserted into it, normally by the tab on the card but the switch (not the tab) can become bent and stuck on. you can fix the sdcard reader by cutting off the write-protect switch pins, the ones that make physical contact with the lock tab on the card. When the switch in the reader is open, write-protect is off, when it is closed (by being pressed upon the the tab on the card) write protect is on. Removing one or both of the switches metal arms will permanently disable write-protect on the reader.
    – Hydranix
    Dec 6, 2016 at 0:49
  • 1
    This does not help if the drive is out of write cycles and turns write protect on by itself.
    – xdevs23
    Jun 17, 2020 at 21:00
45
+50

After researching your question it appears that this is a not-too-uncommon problem with certain brands of USB flash drives (some older Samsung, a Kingston model) that would essentially just "crap out" for no known reason. People had tried opening them and jumping two leads (maybe from a flaky switch?) to no avail. If you still have this drive and it's still in warranty I'd return it and get a replacement.

I hate to break the bad news to you =\ but it appears you're out of luck in this situation as everything I've read points to hardware failure.

Edit 05/27/2016: I experienced an issue personally with a flash drive flaking out on me recently. In my case, this was a Corsair Flash Voyager 128GB that started slowing down pretty drastically on me. While it didn't show the symptoms noted here, it occasionally would not mount and showed up as a "Silicon Power" device. This was a result of the drive having accrued a large amount of bad sectors and dropping into diagnostic/programming mode. Since this is one of my more popular answers and this also falls into the category of "failing flash drives," I figured I'd include it here for reference.

Update 2: Regarding that Corsair Flash Voyager, I sent mine in for an RMA, only to have my second one fail on me in the same fashion. The problem actually turned out to be mechanical. The sliding mechanism seems to put a small amount of pressure on the PCB. Ordinarily, this wouldn't have caused an issue in the normal life span of the device. But for this particular model, it seems to have had weak solder joints that the pressure from the sliding action exacerbated -- leading to oxidation in the cracked joint and eventual failure. Rather than doing yet another RMA, I took matters into my own hands. I opened the case, shaved some of the plastic casing away to give the PCB some wiggle room and then reflowed the NAND chip to repair the broken solder joints. It's working great to this day!

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  • 6
    @admins:i wanna know whether this type of answers are allowed or not :)
    – Tachyons
    Feb 18, 2012 at 15:57
  • 10
    @AboobackerMk If it is the answer, then it is the answer. :)
    – jrg
    Feb 18, 2012 at 15:59
  • 9
    @Tachyons "whether this type of answers are allowed or not?" what is with people on stackexchange consistently trying to discredit other people's questions or answers? This answer is obviously a valid answer; for the reason jrg said. Apr 16, 2015 at 3:05
  • @GoProCameraByGoPro that is 3 year old comment , my concern was not about quality of the answer . and jrg already replied to my question :-)
    – Tachyons
    Apr 16, 2015 at 9:26
  • 1
    @Tachyons I'm doing my part to call the pretension here on stackexchange into question. If I had the data I would look at the trend of the demographic of people who do that and I could probably just ignore it, but for now I'll have to ask them questions as I see them. Apr 16, 2015 at 17:26
30

None of these answers provided so far are correct.

To actually make it work, you can override the detection of the USB disk announcing its read-only with a USB quirks setting. Here's how it works.

  1. Plug in the USB device and do an lsusb, example:

    $ lsusb
    Bus 002 Device 012: ID 0781:5583 SanDisk Corp. 
    
  2. Take note of those two codes after ID and between the colon (they're called the idVendor and idProduct). Unplug the USB device.

  3. Remove the usb_storage kernel module (assuming it's compiled as a module)

    $ sudo modprobe -r $(lsmod | sed -n 's:,: :g ; s,^usb_storage[ 0-9]*,,p') usb_storage
    
  4. Now we will put the module back in using a quirks mode setting to override the detection of the device's write-only flag.

    From source/drivers/usb/storage/usb.c#L572 taken from v4.19 you can see that the quirks mode setting we're looking for is w. Here's how we'll reload the kernel module:

    $ sudo modprobe usb_storage quirks=0781:5583:w
    

    Replace the numbers between the colons with the ones your saw in step (1) from above.

  5. Plug the USB storage device back in. We can now confirm with dmesg that this worked:

    Before: broken write only

    And after: working read/write

    Also after issuing a mount command you'll see:

    /dev/sdb1 on /usb type ext4 (rw,relatime)
    

Now go get your stuff off that disk immediately, it's failing.

6
  • Thank you so much for this answer. I had a problem with a Compact Flash card in a USB reader that appeared to be write-protected and this is the only solution I have found that fixes it. What is weird is that other CF cards are working fine.
    – njh
    Jan 18, 2019 at 13:21
  • 1
    Thank you. This answer is the only one out there working on my failing usb drive.
    – Ajay Singh
    Dec 6, 2019 at 20:01
  • 1
    I have this issue currently when using the Startup disk creator to create an Ubuntu 20 bootable USB stick. I verified it by unmounting it, repartitioning it in Gparted and formatting it FAT32, after which I can write to it. When I remake the pendrive, it's read only again. It remains read-only after using hdparm, remount, etc, there seems to be no way to work around it. Mar 5, 2020 at 9:16
  • 1
    It appears that my usb_storage is compiled as builtin, is there a way to specify this as a boot parameter or something or would I need to recompile my kernel?
    – Joe Baker
    May 30, 2020 at 5:29
  • It's not failing, it's a brand new drive, and it works fine in other partitions other than mint iso images. It works before and after. But it doesn't work when an os image is catted to it.
    – Owl
    Jul 9, 2022 at 17:47
26

using fdisk -l locate the drive, ie: /dev/sdc1

now

umount /dev/sdc1

Finally, reformat the flash-drive

sudo mkfs -t vfat /dev/sdc1

I found this quick and easy. Be sure to UNMOUNT the drive before trying to format.

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  • 2
    sudo mkfs -t vfat /dev/sdc1 > most blog say this , but people say its not working , let see if it works .
    – One Zero
    Feb 18, 2012 at 11:38
  • 10
    unmounted... but mkfs.vfat 3.0.9 (31 Jan 2010) mkfs.vfat: unable to open /dev/sdb1
    – noob
    Feb 18, 2012 at 16:20
  • it worked for me, just had to use -I to make it one big partition and instead of /dev/sdc1, /dev/sdc instead.
    – mchid
    Feb 3, 2015 at 14:21
  • 1
    I tried all other ways (hdparm -r0, blockdev --setrw, remount,rw) but nothing solved my problem except this! Oct 15, 2016 at 0:44
  • 5
    It says mkfs.vfat: unable to open /dev/sdc: Read-only file system
    – Shayan
    Jul 28, 2017 at 4:48
25

Angel's answer is good, but the actual commands weren't so easy for me. This is what worked : Plug in the card (mine is an SD card with a manual write-protect switch on it, but the switch is off and it is writable on a Windows machine). Ubuntu mounted it automatically on /media/andrew/6AB0-1FD91, and dmesg showed the partition to be /dev/sdb1.

Unmount it, and make it writeable

sudo umount /dev/sdb1
sudo hdparm -r0 /dev/sdb

Create a new mount point and mount it there (my userID from /etc/passwd is 1000)

sudo mkdir /media/andrew/temp
sudo mount -o uid=1000 /dev/sdb1 /media/andrew/temp

it'll still complain that it's read-only. I don't know why I had to change this flag before AND after mounting, but that's the only way it worked for me. Set it to writeable again, and remount it at the same place

sudo hdparm -r0 /dev/sdb1
sudo mount -o remount,rw /dev/sdb1

Now I can write to the disk as my normal user. I'm being very careful with it in case it is actually failing, but those commands allowed me to finish what I was doing.

8
  • 1
    NOTE : my card was actually failing (Ubuntu mounts it read-only, but my camera happily writes to it). A couple of months later, it's corrupting files - so while this will work, be careful! Jan 18, 2017 at 6:21
  • I tried your stpes getting .... # sudo mount -o uid=1000 /dev/sdc1 /mnt/ Can only open '/dev/sdc1' as read-only The disk contains an unclean file system (0, 0). The file system wasn't safely closed on Windows. Fixing. Jan 22, 2018 at 6:57
  • 3
    that worked for me, and none of the other above...
    – Pierre
    Mar 12, 2018 at 15:46
  • 1
    This worked after trying many solutions. Thanks @andrewlorien
    – Abk
    Aug 5, 2019 at 14:35
  • 1
    This actually doesn't work. It just mirrors the device. Unplug and replug it and same issue persists. Feb 21, 2020 at 16:45
4

Well, this is a bit of a bummer.

I tried everything here & elsewhere & nothing worked.

Formatted it on a friend's Windows laptop-- works fine now. FFS!

Sigh....(wondering now if I might've been able to fix it in my Win 7 VM on my Mint desktop instead?).

3
  • May you show show your formatting procedure please?
    – Justech
    Feb 8, 2021 at 6:53
  • That was four years ago, so not certain. I would likely have plugged the USB into the Windows machine, opened file explorer> right-click the USB> format. If it doesn't show in file explorer, it may in disk management, where you can also similarly format. Lastly, command prompt to quick format is: format E: /v:Flashname /fs:NTFS /q (your drive letter may not be E:, Flashname is whatever you want to name it, NTFS can be changed to the file system you want).
    – Tracy LF
    Feb 9, 2021 at 13:16
  • 1
    The topic here is beyond your solution.
    – Justech
    Jan 24, 2022 at 9:38
4

This happens when the ISO file was burned to usb using the DD command or any of the "standard" tools.

If it's created like this, there's no way to make it writable.

The way to do it is to burn the ISO using some tool such as unetbootin (linux) or Roofus (Windows).

2
  • 1
    This seems to be the problem in my case. I burned an Ubuntu image into an SD card and nothing I tried would make it writable. I finally was able to write to it by removing it from the SD slot and using an SD-to-USB adapter to plug it into a USB port. Mar 24, 2022 at 14:38
  • Same problem with me, i was trying to make a chromeos image by slipstreaming it into a linux mint usb flash drive.
    – Owl
    Jul 9, 2022 at 18:46
0

I tried the procedure from @kristopolous above but it didn't help me.

What did help me was using ddrescue (the package is called gddrescue) to make an image of the flash drive. Then I could mount the image read-write, do an fsck on the partition, unmount it, and use gparted to copy that partition to another flash drive.

-2

Insert memory stick and start gparted. Select it via the button at top right. It should be obvious if you are inspecting your memory stick (Size is a good clue). Select Partition--> unmount.

Select 'Device' at top, then 'Create Partition Table' and take the default, which is msdos.

Now you should be able to create a new partition and format it f32. If you can't, it's probably bust.

HTH

1
  • 9
    Partitions are not editable because of write protection.
    – noob
    Feb 20, 2012 at 13:50

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