Hard drive suddenly went Read Only

[Doug-007]

I have a HP Z420 workstation that has been running great for a couple of years. 

Main HD is a Samsung 512GB SSD, secondary HD is a Gigabyte 512 SSD (drive E:)

Last night, in the middle of my workshift, drive E: suddenly become Read Only.  Could not edit, delete, or copy and files to the drive.  Drive C and all external drives were fine.

Running Windows 10 Pro, have good virus protection, drivers up to date and all that....

Backed up the contents of the drive to an external.  Tried all the basic troubleshooting / fix techniques.  No luck.

After a lot of searching for fixes on the web, I replaced the drive with TWO other non-ssd SATA 3 drives.  SAME ISSUE! - I get an error saying the disk is write protected.

This makes me believe the problem is NOT with the drive itself. All 3 drive have the same issue.

Here are the fixes I have tried so far:

Formatted the drive

Using the Disk Management utility, totally wiped the drive, created new partitions/volumes and formatted. (tried both MBR and GTP)  Even tried using a different drive letter when formatting.

Using Diskpart, used the "clear readonly" command, and the clean command, even though the Attribute status did NOT show readonly.

CHKDSK E: fails with any fix parameter

Created the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE > SYSTEM > CurrentControlSet > Control.>StorageDevicePolicies>WriteProtect key  and set the value to 0

Tried a different SATA port on the motherboard.

Tried Windows SAFE mode

Device Manager does not show any errors

Cannot find any settings in the BIOS that affect write protection

I can plug in an external USB drive and it works fine.

Can anyone suggest other things to try?

[Lil_Boy_Blue]

Hi

If you used Linux Mint in LIVE mode, running in RAM only, and tested the disks without Microsoft being in the equation?

 or Lubuntu for that matter.

It would perhaps point to the Main Board Controller, rather than the OS?