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Mounting write proteced flash drive

Discussion in 'Legacy Windows' started by Hotaru, 2015/07/09.

  1. 2015/07/09
    Hotaru

    Hotaru Well-Known Member Thread Starter

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    I have 3 flash drives with write protect switches on the side. I keep the write protect switches engaged. They are formatted NTFS since only limited ext3 support is achievable in Windows. Linux doesn't care about all this; it just mounts them read-only.

    Yesterday was the first time I needed to use one of these flash drives on my Win8.1 Pro x64 box. It did get a drive letter but the drive was unmountable. All I could get was an error saying the drive is inaccessible due to being write protected. I found a YouTube video that made it appear I could set HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\StorageDevicePolicies to a value of 1 (DWORD). I tried that but it did not make any difference. I even tried rebooting just to be sure the registry would be re-read.

    Is there some other setting or registry hack I can use, or is this something that Windows just does not allow?
     
    Hotaru,
    #1
  2. 2015/07/09
    Steve R Jones

    Steve R Jones SuperGeek Staff

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    Did you disable the protection switch to see what would happen?
     
    Steve R Jones,
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  4. 2015/07/09
    Hotaru

    Hotaru Well-Known Member Thread Starter

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    I just did and it worked perfectly.

    I use the write protection so I am free to use the drive on a Windows PC that is known to be infected.
     
    Hotaru,
    #3
  5. 2015/07/09
    Steve R Jones

    Steve R Jones SuperGeek Staff

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    When you first popped the drive into the Win 8 machine - did the standard auto play thing pop up? If you cancel that and try to access the drive via Win Explorer did that work?
     
    Steve R Jones,
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  6. 2015/07/09
    lj50 Lifetime Subscription

    lj50 SuperGeek WindowsBBS Team Member

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    What do you mean by "Known to be infected" If you haven't done so already. Why not head over to the Malware and Virus Removal Forum and have broni take a look at that machine. I would also be very helpful if you would please enter your System Specifications. How To Add System Specifications to Your Profile
     
    Last edited: 2015/07/09
    lj50,
    #5
  7. 2015/07/09
    Steve R Jones

    Steve R Jones SuperGeek Staff

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    LJ, I'm guessing he uses the drives to help scan other peoples machines;)
     
    Steve R Jones,
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  8. 2015/07/09
    lj50 Lifetime Subscription

    lj50 SuperGeek WindowsBBS Team Member

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    Thanks Steve. Doh, didn't think of that. When I read anything about a possible infection it raises red flags for me.
     
    Last edited: 2015/07/09
    lj50,
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  9. 2015/07/09
    Hotaru

    Hotaru Well-Known Member Thread Starter

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    There is no autoplay dialog when I insert the drive. It does appear in Explorer. When I try to open the drive, I get the error. Same if I try to go to the drive on the command line.

    This drive is my big multiplatform toolbox archive. Once it was on a CD-RW. Then two CD-RWs. Then a DVD-RW. Now a flash drive. I needed the drive on my Windows PC because I upgraded an application from 6.7 to 7.0 and it forced me to re-enter the serial number. I would have used the Linux PC to grab the serial number, but at the time it was down for a Clonezilla backup which takes 9 hours. That is what I ended up doing once Linux was up again.

    I added my Windows PC specifications to my profile. If you saw my post in the Windows 10 section, this is the one I referred to as the big desktop.
     
    Hotaru,
    #8
  10. 2015/07/10
    TonyT

    TonyT SuperGeek Staff

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    Linux will mount it read-only & that's by design. Windows will not mount it if the write-protect switch is ON. That too is by design.

    I suggest using a small program on the thumb drive that inoculates it. Panda has one and there are others. Such a program prevents the drive from becoming infected on windows systems. An infected computer will usually try to put an autorun.inf file on the thumb drive.

    Panda USB Vaccine - Antimalware and Vaccine for USB devices
     
    TonyT,
    #9

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