Vista - Drives magically write protect themselves

I recently upgraded from Vista 32-bit to Vista 64-bit. I did this reformatting my C drive then performing a clean install of Vista 64-bit. I now have a problem with my volume(s) becoming write protected. I have to fight a constant battle against Vista to keep the volumes writeable.

I have two drives:
WD SE16 640GB: Primary or C drive
Samsung T166 500GB: Secondary or D drive (used mostly for storing downloads, music, video etc.)

Under Disk Management, both my drives alternate between being shown as "Online" and "Write protected": They can be shown as Online and then seconds later I hit F5 and both drives are suddenly write protected. Then I hit F5 again and they're "Online". Sometimes one of the drives is "Online" while the other is "Write protected". It's like a lottery, every time I refresh, the drives show a different status. It's like they're rapidly and constantly changing status.

My C drive always remains writeable despite this. I don't know why - maybe it's because the drive is in use by the paging file and windows system files so the change cannot be applied.

My D: drive on the other hand will write protect itself shortly after I have booted the machine. When I try to rename, copy or delete files I just get a Windows message saying the drive is write protected and I should remove the write protection or use another drive. When this happens I run Diskpart, and the command "Attributes volume clear readonly" on the D volume. This makes the drive writeable, but after a while (somtimes seconds, sometimes hours) the drive magically write protects itself again. As long as I keep modifying files on the drive it remains unprotected even if it sais "Write protected" in the disk management console. But it seems if I leave it idle for a while it will magically write protect itself and I have to do the diskpart thing again.

This is frustrating to say the least.

My user account has administrative privileges. I have tried disabling UAC. I have checked for virueses and background programs and tasks. I have tried about four different versions of the AMD/ATI AHCI drivers. I have checked the BIOS setup for any options that might be write protecting the drive. I have checked for Write Protect jumpers on both drives. This error is totally insane and I never experienced it with Vista 32-bit. It only started happening once I had switched to Vista 64-bit.

System:
Asus M3A32-MVP Delux AMD 790FX/SB600 mobo, Phenom X4 9650, 4x1GB Corsair XMS2, Radeon HD 4850, M-Audio Delta1010LT, WD SE16 640GB, Samsung T166 500GB, Lite-ON DVDRW (P-ATA)

I 'm having the same problem in the Beta Release of Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit
so it seems the problem with volumes write-protecting themselves has not been
resolved. Actually, I'm not sure if it's a Windows generated fault or not.
I too am running AMD/ATI AHCI so maybe it has something to do with that. My
volumes appear to write-protect themselves after a reboot only, not after a
wake up event and not randomly while the computer is running. I've created a
batch file with the command...

diskpart /s [scriptfilename].txt

and in the script file I have these commands...

select disk [disk number]
select volume [volume letter]
attributes volume clear readonly
exit

So at least I've made it easier to write enable the volume everytime the
problem occurs but it's not a solution to the problem.



"JimmiG" wrote:

RonK wrote:
(snip)

Windows 7 (beta) forums
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/...egory/w7itpro/

Malke
--
MS-MVP
Elephant Boy Computers - Don't Panic!
http://www.elephantboycomputers.com/#FAQ

I did manage to solve the problem eventually. In my case it was a matter of updating to version 2.5.1540.48 of the AMD AHCI driver. This driver was not available on Asus's homepage (I have an Asus mobo), but MSI (if I remember correctly) had the more recent version on the support page for one of their 790/SB600 based boards. If you have the SB7xx southbridge I think you need to use the 3.x version of the AHCI driver.

That's great! I'm glad you were able to solve the problem. I'm not exactly
sure what AHCI is but I'm going to do some searching around and try to solve
the problem on my computer. I built this computer at the end of 2007 so I
probably have a lot of hardware drivers I need to update. Like most people,
I just keep the GPU driver up-to-date... for playing games.

I have a Gigabyte mobo with an Intel processor and an NVIDIA GPU. Someone
else on this forum suggested that it might only be a problem on AMD/ATI
computers but I can attest that that is not the case.

For me, the problem seems to be very random. It seems to happen most every
time I wake my computer from sleeping to the point that I never use this most
convenient feature.

Again, thanks for your information.


"JimmiG" wrote: