![Write Protect USB Drives USB Write Protect](http://www.gohacking.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/USB_Write-protect1.jpg)
But unfortunately, most of the new flash drives do not come with a write-protect feature as the manufacturers wish to cut down the cost of production. Hence, the only way to write-protect your USB flash drives is to enable this feature on your own computer.
This can be done by adding a small entry to the Windows registry which acts as a switch that can be enabled to make use of the write protection or disabled to allow write access. Just follow these steps:
1. Open the Registry Editor (Open the “Run” dialog box, type regedit and hit “Enter”).
2. Navigate to the following Registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\
3. Create a New Key named as StorageDevicePolicies. To do this right-click on Control, and click on New->Key and name it as StorageDevicePolicies.
4. Now right-click on StorageDevicePolicies and create a New->DWORD (32-bit) Value and name it as WriteProtect.
![USB_Write-protect Write-Protect USB Drive](http://www.gohacking.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/USB_Write-protect.jpg)
5. Double-click on WriteProtect and set the Value data to 1.
Now the right-protection for USB drives is enabled on your computer (no restart required) and thus it would not be possible for anyone or any program to add/delete the contents from your USB flash drive. Any attempt to copy or download the files onto the USB drive will result in the following error message being displayed.
![USB-Write Protect Error USB-Write Protect Error](http://www.gohacking.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Warning.jpg)
To revert and remove the write-protection, all you need to do is just change the Value data for WriteProtect (Step-5) from 1 back to 0. Now write access to all the USB devices is re-enabled.
Sometimes it may seem difficult to remember and follow the above mentioned steps each time you want to enable/disable the write protection. Hence as an alternative way, there are many tools available to automatically enable/disable the write-protection feature. One of my favorite tool is USB Write Protect by Naresh Manadhar. Using this tool you can limit write access to your USB drives with just a click of a button.
You can download this tool from the following link:
[Via Gohacking]
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