Although Flash based storage is very reliable, like always things tend so go wrong. Today i plugged my USB thumb-drive into a school computer to access my project files, only to find later on that it something (Probably a Trojan Horse or a Virus) had corrupted my drive to a point where i could not access the drive and retrieve

any file. This was pretty damn scary as projects i had spent endless hours on were all on the thumbdrive and i had not made any backups! (Lesson one: Always have backups) Fortunately enough i managed to extract the data from the drive and had to format it in order for it to function again like it was brand new out-of-the-box

Below is a list of steps i had to go through in order to recover my data and to fix the drive:

First i used a piece of software by the name of Get Data Back For NTFS Ver 3.03. I tried quiet a few different programs before finding this one and none of the others functioned properly. Some would analyze the drive and were able to extract the files, but all the files were corrupted and were basically useless! Other programs did not even detect the drive! Get Data Back for NTFS was able to retrieve 100% of the files on the drive, and to my surprise they all functioned perfectly.

Now that i had my data stored on my desktop, i needed to fix my corrupt 4gb thumbdrive as at this point i really cannot afford to purchase another. From basic computer knowledge, the first thing that i tried to do with the drive was to format it. I went into My computer, right clicked on the drive and clicked format. Unfourtanetly, this did not work as planned and i recieved the message, “Write Protected Thumb Drive, Cannot Format.” This was sort of odd as my thumb drive had no switches to disable or enable write protection. After a few minutes of Googling, it was astonishing to see how many other users had the same problem with their thumb drives.

The solution to fixing the, “Write protected Drive” was pretty simple:

First click on the Start Button -> Run and type -> regedit. Then navigate to

My Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet

\Control\StorageDevicePolicies

On the right hand side you should see a registry key by the name of WriteProtect and it should have a value of 1. The one means that it is enabled, so disable it and voila! the “Write Protected” messages you were recieving are history. Now all you have to do is format the drive perhaps using the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool and your corrupt drive is as good as new!

Preventing Drive Failures from occurring:

Do not pull your drive physically out without first safely removing it (Taskbar->Safely Remove Hardware)
Do not pull the drive out when data is being transfered.