I’ve combed this site (and others) looking for a solution to my issue, but so far one has eluded me.
I have a WD 1TB Passport external USB drive I’ve had for a few years now - model 1011B. I plugged it into my Windows 10 system (Win Pro) last night to suddenly find that the drive is now read only, and I cannot delete, edit, or add any files to it. After looking around for solutions, I’ve tried the following things:
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Installing the WD Smartware software, after which I disabled Security on the drive. This didn’t fix it. I then ran all three diagnostic tools available - the Status Test, the quick Diagnostic, and the full disk check. All of these diagnostic tests passed.
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Checked Disk Management, and attempted to see if I could make the disk writable through Disk Properties. No.
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Ran Diskpart and tried to mark the volume and disk not Read Only. Funny thing with this - the disk is actually showing in Diskpart as NOT Read Only. Running the ATTR commands to render the volume and disk writable regardless of that didn’t work.
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Edited the \HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\StorageDevicePolicies\WriteProtect so that it reads 0 to see if that would fix it. It didn’t fix it.
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Completely uninstalled the drive from my system in Device Manager after unplugging it from my machine and fully removing all WD software, after which I rebooted my system. Plugged in the drive to let it rebuild the device and install the drivers, and then checked it. Still Read Only.
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Exasperated at this point, I unplugged the drive and then plugged it into my wife’s laptop. Surprisingly, it was writable, and I could edit, add, or delete files to my heart’s content. Somewhat heartened, I deleted the drive from my own system’s Device Manager once again, rebooted, and then plugged in my drive just to check. Sure enough, it was still Read Only.
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I then tried to take ownership of the drive. This of course failed because the disk is Read Only. I did notice something strange with this though. The drive’s owner is not SYSTEM, or my account (which I am of course an Administrator) - instead it listed the typical long string of alpha numeric characters one sees when a device or file can no longer find the account that originally had ownership. I checked the registry to make sure, and that account entry didn’t exist.
At this point, I’m somewhat at a loss of what to do. I copied all the data off the drive in case it was failing somehow, but I’m still loathe to completely wipe it unless there’s no other alternative. Is there something else I can try? Have I missed something?