Solved Write Protected Flash Drive - Toshiba 16GB

[jimnycricket]

A software company send me a program on a usb flash drive - Toshiba 16GB. I just received another one as they upgraded my program. I went to format the little toy and it tells me that it is WRITE PROTECTED.

I tried to go in regedit to see if the value for write protect is set 0 or 1 - needs to be 0.

I tried couple of freewares but failed.

Any suggestion?

 

[ashleyg]

Sometimes they have a physical protect/unprotected switch on the device itself. Not that I suppose?

 

[jimnycricket]

No, nothing visible

 

[ashleyg]

Looks like it's a Toshiba thing.
Check this link out if you haven't seen it already:

How to Remove Write Protection From a Toshiba Flash Drive | eHow.com

 

[jimnycricket]

Thanks for the suggestion but I did see that. It didn't work for me.

 

[jumanji]

Did you use the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool and Run it as Administrator?

 

[jimnycricket]

I just tried and it still give me it's write protected. Thanks, guys (and gals)

 

[jumanji]

OK, we are thinking of normal consumer pendrives. Now I read some meaning in what you said
" a software company sent me a program on a USB pendrive"

It could be that it is copy-protected and not formattable too.

( I certainly remember having read somewhere that Secure Digital card specifications include some sort of copy protection too ( and that is why secure) but that is not normally implemented in the consumer cards. There are firms which specialise in copy protecting the media for software authors. Anti-piracy | Copy-Protection | Software-Protection | Piracy-Protection )

 

[jimnycricket]

SOLVED:
I don't know why I didn't decided to google autodesk media toshiba 16GB flash drive first but when my mind got to it, I found this link and tried the first method but this Edit 2 suggestion did the job for me:
What Revit Wants: Repurposing the Autodesk USB Media

Edit 2 - You may want to try Formatter first - Craig at iRevit has hosted the Formatter.zip and tested it (May 2012)

If you need to do this, go to the url and click on Formatter.zip link for download.

Thanks everyone.

 

[jumanji]

Good.

As I rightly inferred it was copy-protected.

And requires an inside knowledge to break it to regain or repurpose the drive and that is what is being done in the blog you mentioned.