How to Write-Protect Your USB Flash Drive

Many a time, it becomes necessary forus towrite protectourUSB flash driveso as to protect it from viruses and other malware programs.As flash drives are so popular and most widely used to move data between computers, they are the prime target for attackers as a mns to get infections sprd around the computer world.Also, since USB driveis not aRd-Only Memory (ROM),the data insideit can sily be modified or deleted by malware programs.But unfortunately, most of the new flash drives do not come with awrite-protect fture as themanufacturers wish to cut down the cost of production. Hence, the only way to write-protect your USB flash drives is to enable this fture on your own computer.Steps to Write-Protect Your USB Drive:This can bedone by adding a small entry to the registry which acts as a switchthat can be enabled to make use of the write protection or disabled to allow write access. Here we go:Open theRegistry Editor(Open the “Run” dialog box, typeregeditand hit “Enter”).Navigate to the following Registry :H_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Crte a New named asStorageDevicePolicies. To do this, right-click onControl, again click on New ->and name it asStorageDevicePolicies.Now right-click onStorageDevicePoliciesand crte a New ->DWORD (32-bit) Valund name it asWriteProtect.Double-click onWriteProtectand set theValue datato1.Now the right-protection for USB drivesis 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 theValue dataforWriteProtect(Step-5) from1back to0.Now write access to all the USB devices is re-enabled.Sometimes itmay seem difficult to remember and follow the above mentioned steps ch time you want toenable/disable the write protection. Hence as an alternative way, there are many tools available to automatically enable/disable the write-protection fture. One of my favorite tool isUSB Write ProtectbyNaresh Manadhar.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:USBWriteProtectI hope you’ve now understood how to enable or disable write-protection of USB devices on your computer
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