It was yesterday when I got some data transferred in my pen drive at my College that made me think that I need to Write Protect my pen drive. I just put the drive in a system for about 10 seconds and there were about 7 different types of viruses in my Pen Drive (really college systems sucks). It is so irritating to always scan the drive to remove the viruses that also consumes our important time. So I got something to share with you guys “How you can Write Protect your Pen Drive” or “How you can prevent your pen drive from getting infected”.

Things to note before doing this:

•    As the trick will write protect your pen drive, you will not be able to transfer anymore data until you disable it again (works best if you only wish to copy or read something from the drive).

•    If you are not good at editing registry then backup yours (read this).

•    You need Admin rights to work upon the Registry Editor.

Steps to make your drive Write Protected:

1.    Open Registry Editor by typing regedit in Run dialog.

2.    Navigate to the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\

3.    Find a sub key inside it named “StorageDevicePolicies”. If it does not exist there then we need to make it. Right click on “Control” key -> New -> Key. Name it “StorageDevicePolicies” without quotes.

4.    Now right click on this newly created key and then click New -> DWORD value and name it as “WriteProtect”.

5.    Modify this key and give it a value 1.

6.    Click OK, and remember to restart the PC.

Now no more data can be transferred to the drive but to start using the drive again just give the “WriteProtect” key a value of 0 instead of 1 and restart the PC.

So any thoughts how you are going to use this trick?