Windows 10: Cannot format Windows install thumb drive. Current Read-only State stuck on Yes

Hello all,


I recently had to reinstall my OS after upgrading the PC and sadly found out that my Windows flash drive is corrupted (copy files works fine but errors out at around 20% during install).

I managed to get hold of another bootable USB stick and installed Win10 smoothly from that one, however I am now trying to format the original thumb drive to re-add the Windows install files from Microsoft, but found that the stick is write protected.

I tried adding a QWORD in registry editor under Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\StorageDevicePolicies, also tried with a DWORD (although x64 OS).

I cleared disk attributes read only from PowerShell, currently the "attributes disk" response is as follows:

DISKPART> list disk

Disk ### Status Size Free Dyn Gpt
-------- ------------- ------- ------- --- ---
Disk 0 Online 465 GB 0 B *
Disk 1 Online 111 GB 2048 KB *
Disk 2 Online 931 GB 1024 KB *
Disk 3 Online 14 GB 0 B

DISKPART> select disk 3

Disk 3 is now the selected disk.

DISKPART> attributes disk
Current Read-only State : Yes
Read-only : No
Boot Disk : No
Pagefile Disk : No
Hibernation File Disk : No
Crashdump Disk : No
Clustered Disk : No


I cannot seem to get the Current Read-only State to No (there is no physical switch on the drive itself either) and this seems to be the reason why, when trying to format the USB after all I've done, it keeps saying it's write protected.

The "clean" command returns: DiskPart has encountered an error: The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error. See the System Event Log for more information.

This is all I've found online as a resolution to this type of issue, unfortunately it did not help in my situation.

Are Microsoft Windows USB install drives hardware locked from factory and cannot be formatted and re-used if they become corrupted?


Any help would be appreciated,

Kind Regards,

Daniel

:)

 

Can a thumb drive be disabled by malware?

There are quite a few possibilities to what happened to your thumb drive:

1. It might be a simple issue where the partition got corrupted: In this case you can go to Computer Management > Disk Management> and check out what partition your thumb drive currently has. If it currently is in RAW format or is just unallocated, I suggest you unallocate the entire drive and make a new partition. It's possible that you can recover upto 99% of your files with a tool like EaseUS DataRecovery Wizard Pro.
   
2. The malware corrupted your thumb drive's firmware: The malware that your thumb drive may have encountered may be similar to something like BadUSB. It may or may not have modified your drive's firmware to transmit malware, but in any case your thumb drive's pretty dead, and there's not much you can do about it.
   

 

reading thumb drives

I have IE 11 and windows 10. Toshiba Laptop cannot read thumb drive. The usb port recognizes other devices such as pointing wireless etc but the port will not recognize a thumb drive.

 

Kingston thumb drive format

How do I format a usb thumb drive for music? Kingston Data Traveler, Windows 10