Hard drive locked as Read-Only

Ive had this problem once before. I turned my PC on Yesterday, and my WD 500GB Hard drive (Number 3) was not recognised. Then I did a reboot, and the drive showed up again, HOWEVER, The drive has the Read Only flag in DiskPart and using the attrib disk clear readonly commands with the correct disk selected does not work. DiskPart just moans that It cant clear the attribute.


Any suggestions are welcome & Im willing to try anything. I doubt its a Driver Issue or a Hardware issue as It was working fine.


All the tests in Ubuntu 10.04 (my second os) come up good and I can write to it, So Windows 7 has done something, Not sure what.

At first I thought that chmod in the command line would be your best bet but i dont think if you could do it on an entire drive..

do you have any drive encryption software (bitblocker comes with win 7 ultimate). its possible that could cause some problems if used incorrectly

No. I dont use any drive encryption.

Some people suggested making a Registry key but Ive allready tried this.

I also tried scheduling a chkdisk /f on reboot but it only checked the system drive

next time u get it working go under the C directory and right click. go to properties. select the security tab. There should be the different user modes with different permission levels set for each one. on my computer for the system and admin all of the permissions are check except the last one. for a standard user only the read and execute, list folders, and read are allowed. i believe these are the defaults. you likely use an admin account correct? check to make sure all the permissions are allowed.

The properties are the same for all the drives.

Still not sure as to why its not working.

Right, I have come across a fix! (at long last)
I hope this helps others as it helped me.
Open the disk properties and goto the Drivers tab
Uninstall the driver
Reboot your PC
When it starts up again, Log in and it should say that the device has been installed successfuly.
Reboot again (if windows doesnt tell you to)
Now its working perfectly.
Thanks for the help sulamaz

ConorM said:

Right, I have come across a fix! (at long last)
I hope this helps others as it helped me.
Open the disk properties and goto the Drivers tab
Uninstall the driver
Reboot your PC
When it starts up again, Log in and it should say that the device has been installed successfuly.
Reboot again (if windows doesnt tell you to)
Now its working perfectly.
Thanks for the help sulamaz

So it was a driver issue