How to Write-Protect Your USB Flash Drive

Many a time, it becomes necessary for us to write protect our USB flash drive so as to protect it from viruses and other malware programs. As flash drives are so popular and most widely used to move data between computers, they are the prime target for attackers as a means to get infections spread around the computer world. Also, since USB drive is not a Read-Only Memory (ROM), the data inside it can easily be modified or deleted by malware programs.

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.

Steps to Write-Protect Your USB Drive:

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. Here we go:

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, again click on New -> Key and name it as StorageDevicePolicies.
4. Now right-click on  StorageDevicePolicies and create a New -> DWORD (32-bit) Valueand name it as WriteProtect.
   
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.
   

To revert and remove the write-protection, all you need to do is just change the Value data forWriteProtect (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:

USBWriteProtect

I hope you’ve now understood how to enable or disable write-protection of USB devices on your computer.

How to Install Windows 7 From a USB Drive

Installing Windows from a USB flash drive has several advantages – First of all, the overall speed of the installation process will increase significantly, carrying a USB stick is much more convenient than a DVD, and finally it becomes possible to install the OS even on those systems that do not have a DVD drive, such as a netbook.

In this post, I will show you how to load the Windows installation on to your USB flash drive and make it bootable just like the DVD.

Tools Required to Load Windows 7 Installation Files:

1. USB flash drive with a minimum capacity of 4 GB.
2. Windows 7 set-up DVD.

Now, just follow the steps below:

Step-1:

Plug-in your USB flash drive and backup all the existing data in it.

Open the command prompt. If you are using Windows 7/Vista then open it with administrator rights.

ie: Go to Start -> All Programs -> Accessories -> Right-click on “Command Prompt” and select “Run as Administrator”.

Step-2:

In the command prompt, type in the following command:

DISKPART

Step-3:

Now issue the following command:

LIST DISK

This will show you a list of  available disks on your system. Disk 0 is usually the hard disk. In my case, Disk 5 is the USB drive (this can be a different one in your case). 

SELECT DISK 5

NOTE: In the above command, 5 is the USB drive number on my system. If you have a different number on your system, then you need to replace 5 with that number.

Step-4:

Now issue the following list of commands one by one as shown below:

CLEAN

CREATE PARTITION PRIMARY

SELECT PARTITION 1

ACTIVE

FORMAT FS=NTFS QUICK

ASSIGN

EXIT

Minimize the command prompt and proceed to the next step.

Step 5:

Insert the Windows 7/Vista installation disc and note down the “drive letter” of your DVD drive. In my case, it is “H:”. Now type the following list of commands as shown below:

H: CD BOOT

CD BOOT

BOOTSECT.EXE /NT60 M: (NOTE: M: is your USB drive letter)

EXIT

Step-6:

Copy the contents of your Windows 7/Vista installation disk into the USB flash drive.

That’s it! Your USB stick is now ready to boot and install the Windows 7 for you. Don’t forget to enable the “USB Boot” option and change the “boot priority to USB device from hard disk” in your BIOS settings.