Flash Drive issue I can't find

[abailey21]

So I use a flash drive in my vehicle for music, I normally load a 4Gb and have at it. I haven't done anything different than I normally do, other than unplugging it and plugging it into my iMac.

So I try to load some music on it this morning and I get a popup telling me it's write protected and I can't do anything with it?

I opened up the disc utility, but I can't repair, format, verify or anything else because it's write protected. Normally with Windows I was able to right click and hit properties and remove this, I tried on my gaming PC and no joy there either.

anyone know of any tricks to this?

 

[Fizzoid]

Very strange, it should at least format even if the files on there are write protected. Have you tried formatting it on a Windows machine?

 

[MacRUK]

So I use a flash drive in my vehicle for music, I normally load a 4Gb and have at it. I haven't done anything different than I normally do, other than unplugging it and plugging it into my iMac.

So I try to load some music on it this morning and I get a popup telling me it's write protected and I can't do anything with it?

I opened up the disc utility, but I can't repair, format, verify or anything else because it's write protected. Normally with Windows I was able to right click and hit properties and remove this, I tried on my gaming PC and no joy there either.

anyone know of any tricks to this?

Sound mechanical.

Is there a tiny little switch that may have been moved ?

 

[wrldwzrd89]

This is almost always caused by one of two things, with flash drives:
1. Most flash drives have a tiny hardware write-protect switch. Check this, to make sure it hasn't accidentally been flipped.
2. Check the format of the drive - if it's NTFS you won't be able to do much with it without a 3rd-party utility. I don't think this is likely though, since you say you can't even format it.