Vista - Cannot write to drive "Media is write protected"

Hi all,

This seems to be a new development, and I'm stumped. I've got three internal hard drives- one housing Vista Ultimate x64, one housing Ubuntu 8.04 x64, and one being used for storage for both OS's. Up until recently they've cooperated nicely. Now, the storage drive (drive E:\) will not let me write to it. I cannot rename, delete, cut, or write any new files to any part of that drive. That's troublesome, since that's where I send all of my downloads to! Even earlier in this session of windows it was working nicely, I was able to download a torrent of the recent Ubuntu 8.04 release (legal and distributed from ubuntu.com). I started a session of Assassin's Creed (a game), and now that I've quit that, I cannot write to the drive. Specifically, the error is:

"The disk is write protected. Remove the write protection or use another disk."

I've tried changing the security settings to allow USERS, or even just Administrators, full control of the drive, to no avail. I cannot modify the security settings. When I try, I get:

"An error occurred while applying security information to

E:\xyzpath\123filename

The media is write protected."

I can assure you that I've not enabled any type of write protection. Any ideas? I'd really like to have this working again as otherwise I'm extremely limited on storage space. Thanks in advance!

Bogus

Hi again. Sorry to post a question and then answer it myself, but I saw the question come up in a few other places and thought I'd post the solution I found here, in case anyone else came looking. Checkdisk did not do the trick. I had to use Diskpart.

From a cmd prompt, I ran "diskpart". I selected the drive, and then the volume, then ran "Attributes volume clear readonly". Immediately I was able to set security permissions and am currently downloading my new Ubuntu disc at 900kb/s.

Note: I have not yet rebooted, so I'm not sure if this solution will persist, or if the problem will randomly occur again. I am using SP1 also, in case anyone is interested.

Hi all. In case anyone was curious, it DID happen again, totally at random. Not sure what's causing it, but the same fix as before worked again.

Same deal here. Starting to bother me big time. I downloaded Ubuntu 8.04 release but didn't do anything with it? Just the ISO.

I'm not sure if this will help, but I found this thread while I was
searching for a solution to the "write-protected" issue, and now that it
seems to be fixed I figured I'd let you know how I worked it out.

The drive that gave me the message was a USB 500Gb external which I
moved from my old XP box when I installed Vista HPx64 on a brand new
machine. After a lot of Googling, I tried 'the diskpart method bogus83
suggested'
(http://forums.techarena.in/showpost....16&postcount=2). It
seemed to work, but just a couple of seconds later, my antivirus ('Avira
AntiVir'
(http://www.free-av.de/en/download/1/...antivirus.html)
-- free and excellent) popped up a warning that it had found a boot
sector virus in that drive called 'Sinowal.A'
(http://blogs.technet.com/antimalware...-a-report.aspx).
I told it to delete the virus, but it couldn't and that's when *the AV
program write-protected the drive*. Aha!

I tried to get rid of the virus by following the instructions at 'this
Microsoft site' (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927392) and it probably
would have worked except that those tools only fix the MBR on the system
drive which has Vista -- not on any other drives. Then I found this
tool, 'MBRFix' (http://www.sysint.no/nedlasting/mbrfix.htm) which is a
98Kb file that runs from the command line. So here's how I did it:


- Download *MBRFix.exe* to your User folder
- Boot the computer into a fresh session
- Go to -Start | All Programs | Accessories-
- Right-click on *Command Prompt*
- Choose -"Run as administrator"-
- Choose -"Allow"- from the UAC popup box (if you haven't turned it
off)
- At the *C:\Users\{your name}\>* prompt, type
*MBRFix /drive {drive number} fixmbr /yes*
- Repeat the command for however many drives are infected/write
protected
- Restart and check your antivirus or see if you are still unable to
write to the drive


If it was the virus, you should allow your anti-virus program and a
good spyware program or two to run through a full system scan. It's been
a couple of days, and (fingers crossed) it seems to be fixed! Hope this
helps someone.


--
evano
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View this thread: http://forums.techarena.in/showthread.php?t=961967

http://forums.techarena.in

Hi, same problem here...
I performed the "diskpart" solution from bogus83, but after the restart, grub did not get past stage 1.5 (seems to be in a loop, as no error message).

Anyone an idea of what has gone wrong? I did run a virus-check (Norton 360) before restarting, and no problems were found.

My configuration is:

Ubuntu 8.04 on 250GB Maxtor (grub installed here)
Vista Ultimate X64 on (Software) Raid 0 (2 x WD Raptor 37GB)
Asus P5B Deluxe Wi-Fi
Intel E6600

I (think) I have solved my issue:
after having restored my MBR using the Vista DVD, I updated the jmicron (SATA/RAID controller drivers), and so far have not seen the problem return.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that that was the cause...

I have similar issue. 2 harddrives, Vista 64 is on 2nd, Windows XP on 1st.
And No any RAID, also updated drivers.
Nothing helps - it occurs time ti time, and reboot always helps.
I searched with google, it turned out that many people complain about it and
they all have different configuration, so there is no any pattern (except 2
or more HDs). So it is Vista bug and any remedy is temporary until MS fix
it...

"jukka77" wrote:

Hi,

for me the problem reappeared a few days after I had updated my SATA/RAID controller drivers. So that wasn't it. Instead I connected the drive onto a different SATA controller (that was about a week ago), and it seems as if that has solved it for me. No idea why, though...

I'm getting the same issue with an internal HD that I use for data storage. There must be some kind of definitive fix for this.