I have two workstations both Windows XP SP3 and all of a sudden neither of them will allow the user to write to a USB flash drive.
They get a message that says "error copying file or folder" "access denied" "make sure disk is not full or write protected".
They can copy files/folders from the USB to their desktop,
but not write to it. All the files/folders in the drive are marked "Read Only" and when I change them, they just change back.
Logging in as an admin and formatting the drive didn't change anything, even admin account couldn't write to the flash drive.
Using this flash drive on another identical computer with same OS image - it works fine. Read, Write, Delete, Format, worked fine.
I even took a flash drive I knew was working and plugged it in the computer in question - it wouldn't allow me to write to it, but when I brought it back to my own computer, it worked fine again.
I've looked at this issue online and saw a few different solutions including the following:
some people said, make sure "simple file sharing" is off and go to the Security Tab to assign rights to the user in question - simple file sharing was already off and this tab isn't available for FAT/FAT32 drives (this is a flash drive). so this solution didn't work for me.
another site said to check the registry for the "storagedevicepolicies" key and change the value for "write protected" to zero, when I opened regedit on this machine, that key didn't exist and manually adding it made no difference.
another suggestions was to try DiskPart and use the "attributes disk clear readonly" and "attributes volume clear readonly" commands... those didn't work. they only returned a list of available commands for DiskPart and "attributes" wasn't even there. Does this method even work for FAT32 flash drives?
I've even tried using an Unlocker app many had suggested - didn't work.
I assigned the drive a new drive letter. No luck.
I think I've looked at most, if not, all of the options to fix this issue - still can't write to the flash drive.
Any help is greatly appreciated!