HP USB 32GB Suddenly show disk is write protected

[holston77]

Hard to believe this write protect problem has been around since 2017.  I have several HP computers and the USB drives (I bought 2) are not recoverable with any available means -- registry setting, diskpart, independent USB drive formatter, etc. Both became write protected and locked-up my W10 HP laptop. Both became write protected a few days apart and during the first few uses, transferring fairly large MP4 and ZIP/RAR files. Same result with multiple computers and also W7 operating system. I probably own 30 or more USB drives and no other such problems with other drives, even up to 256gb.

[Lil_Boy_Blue]

Hi

Write protection?

Dirty Bit set?

https://www.raymond.cc/blog/manually-reset-or-clear-dirty-bit-in-windows-without-chkdsk/

[Photoray002]

@holston77 

Are you just here to make a statement or were you looking for a solution?

I believe PNY is still making HP's USB drives and yes PNY has had this issue for several years.

If the option above doesn't work, the only solution I know of that works most of the time is to use their format tool. One of of the three versions of Ufix should do it.

Here is the link, scroll down to USB Flash Drive Format Tool and try each one till you find the one that hopefully works.

https://www.pny.com.tw/en/support-detail/usb-flash-drives/

[holston77]

I certainly would like a solution but tried every one of the USB format tools I could locate before posting my message. That fact plus the fact I have yet to find a statement by anyone that they have successfully recovered one of these drives. I have used quite a few PNY drives without incident, but if this is a long standing problem, it would seem reasonable that they would have  done an engineering analysis of the failure mode, corrected the problem and provided a format program that worked under some operating conditions.  I will follow your link and try again and will be happy to post the result if I am successful. Thank you for your comments.