Sandisk flash drive won't delete

[Darksky40]

I have Sandisk flash drives and I am having problem's deleting or Formating as it is says This Disk is protected how do I delete or Format please?

 

[Pyprohly]

Hi Darksky,

Are you able to add or delete files from your SanDisk flash drive? Also, have you tried using an alternate machine to format your device?

 

[Darksky40]

I am able to add on to the Flash Drive but not delete and I have only one machine or access to one machine. I have also read on some instructions to the Scandisk something about Mac does that mean it needs a Mac computer as I have Windows 7? I am wanting to delete a few files or documents.

 

[Pyprohly]

Hm. It's strange that you are able to write to the USB, but not delete from it.

Would you be able to state the filesystem type of your flash drive? And also, it would help if you could upload an image of the exact message you receive when deleting items from your flash drive.

 

[Pauly]

HP do a nice low level format utility that works well on flash drives I have used it in the past on thumb drives that had ghost files on that wouldn't delete and it did the trick

 

[Darksky40]

Thank's for reply and these are the details of the flash drive SanDisk Cruzer Blade, Windows\system32\Drivers\disk.sys, File System FAT 32, 16 Kilobytes. The reason I can't delete or Format but would like to is it keep coming up with the message The disk is write Protected. a bit like the old floppy computer disks had small gap unless you stuck a piece a sticky tape to wipe over. But how do you delete or format the flash drive?

 

[Pyprohly]

If a disk is 'write protected' usually this means it has the read-only attribute set on it. The read-only attribute on a disk normally prevents you from both deleting and writing to the disk, which the ladder action contrasts to your situation, Darksky.

It may be worth a shot to try and remove any read-only attribute on your flash drive, if that's what's preventing you from formatting the disk.

Open an Elevated Command Prompt then copy, paste and run the below command line, substituting the red 'D' with the drive letter of your problematic disk.

net>NUL sess 2>&1&&(echo sel vol [COLOR=red][B]D[/B][/COLOR] &echo att dis clear readonly &echo att vol clear readonly)|diskpart||echo error

If the above doesn't work, Darksky, you'll have to use a low level format utility to format your flash drive as it's hard to tell what exactly is preventing you from formatting it.