(Solved) Cannot Format Lexar 32GB USB Write Protected

About write protected

If your Lexar 32GB USB is write protected, you will find that you cannot add files to your flash drive or delete files from it. Also, you cannot format write protected USB drive and the system will tell you “the disk is write protected”.

Your flash drive may have a write protect switch or be infected by virus. Also, it’s possible that the drive has a corrupted file system. Besides, the registry key may be incorrect. What’s worse, your drive is dead.

How to remove write protection from Lexar USB flash drive?

If your flash drive is write protected in Windows 7/8/10, the first thing is to check if the Lexar had a write protect switch. If it has, you are supposed to slide the write protect switch to the other side. And then, you need to scan your drive with Antivirus software.

If your problem is not caused by the write protect switch or virus infection, you should continue to see below and try the following solutions one by one.

Remove write protected Lexar 32GB USB using Regedit

If the registry key is incorrect, you can go to Windows Registry editor and change the value of the WriteProtect key from 1 to 0 and then try to add files to the USB flash drive or delete files from it.

Step 1. Type regedit in the Run window.

Step 2. Navigate to the following subkey and find the WriteProtectkey on the right panel.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\StorageDevicePolicies

Step 3. Double-click the WriteProtect key and change the value to 0. If there is no WriteProtect key, you can create a new one and set its value to 0.

Step 4. Try to add new items to the flash drive or remove some items from this drive.

Fixed: Cannot format USB drive write protected

If your drive has corrupted file system, you can use Diskpart to clear all write-protection file attributions from the disk and reformat it again.

Note:The operation below will lead to data loss, so you’d better tobackup files first.

Step 1. Type cmd in the search box, right-click it and select Run as administrator.

Step 2. Type diskpart in the pop-up window and press Enter.

Step 3. Type the commands below in order and hitEnter to run it.

• list disk

• select disk n (n refers to the number of write-protected Lexar USB drive)

• attributes disk clear readonly

• clean

• create partition primary

• format fs=fat32 (or format fs=ntfs)

Step 4. Exit this window and check if it works.

If you are not familiar with command prompt, you can use Lexar USB format tool AOMEI Partition Assistant. It’s much easier. All the steps are fixed and there is no possibility of operational error.

Format write protected USB in Windows 7/8/10 with Lexar USB format tool

Flash drive is write protected how to format it? This is a common question for users who meet this error at the first time. Now, let’s start to format Lexar USB drive with AOMEI Partition Assistant.

Step 1. Backup files before formatting disk.

Step 2. Download Lexar USB format tool – free AOMEI Partition Assistant and run it. In the main page right-click the write-protected disk and then select the Format Partition option.

Step 3. Select NTFS or FAT32 file system from the drop-down menu and click OK to exit.

Step 4. Click Apply and thenProceed to start the pending operation.

Now, you may successfully remove Lexar 32GB USB write protected with above ways. I prefer the last one not only because it’s easy to operate but also because it has more features and less risk.

With AOMEI Partition Assistant, you can do more things than you want. You can fix Windows was unable to complete the format, virtual disk service error the volume size is too big, and more.

AOMEI Partition Assistant has both free version and paid version. The free version can help you partition hard drive and fix some problems. But it cannot fix all problems. If you cannot fix your problems, you need to upgrade to AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional or Server according to your needs. With it, you can fix converting to GPT grayed out, converting to basic disk greyed out, etc.