How do you turn off write protect on your hard drive?

Yes, it is possible to protect your hard drive using the lock command. E.g.

Lock sys: on - this will lock your partition Lock sys: off - this will unlock it.

If you wish to lock a drive other than your main partition simply substitute Sys: for the drive name.

I have a question for you: How do you turn ON write protection on your hard drive to begin with? As far as I know you can't. Hard drives were designed to be written on. You can't install an operating system on it without writing to the disk.

The only way to prevent someone from saving something would be through the operating system's security management. Before you can disable what you think is write protection, you need to understand what is protecting it to begin with.

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Some hard drives have a jumper on them for write protect. You need to check the jumper settings

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I just had this issue with one of my external hard drives. It's an internal drive that I installed into an external case and connects to my computer via FireWire. I knew it couldn't be a jumper setting, because the drive has not been removed from the case since it was put in there. I did NOT turn "ON" write protection at any time. I've been writing to this disc with no problems (daily) up until today. I tried copying a file to it, it popped up a message saying that can not write to disk, disk is write protected. I did nothing to cause this. No settings, attributes, etc. After looking around a bit with no luck (not even from here). I tried a couple of my own things. Found I could not change attributes (cause disk is write protected).

I finally unplugged the drive from the firewire port and waited a few minutes. Plugged it back in and let the computer "find" the drive again, and all is well.

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The write protect is in your bios. You select "enable" write protect and it will ask you for a password. Note: not all bios versions offer this option.

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I'm considering cleaning up my hard drive of all unwanted ware, especially spyware, and then turning on "write protect" for my hard drive to keep the stuff out. I'll be using a flash pen to surf with which can be cleaned much faster than a hard drive full of stuff and zillions of places for things to hide.

The post above said you turn on this feature in the bios. Can you elaborate on this as to how it's done? I have a Thinkpad r40 and can't seem to find anything on how to do it at ibm or google.

Thanks in advance...

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I just had the same thing happen. Hard drive said write protected. Not even a floppy at boot would work. Then I realized when I hit delete for setup, both the hard drive and floppy were flipped to write protect in the bios.

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I had the same thing happen to an old P III 800mhz computer; "write protected" message. After reading this I looked in CMOS for a setting for hard drive write protect, I have never heard of this as a bios option (floppy write protect yes, but not harddrive), did NOT find a setting for write protect for either floppy or hard, but I went ahead and did a reset CMOS to optimal setting anyway, booted and all was right with the world!

Thank you for the helpful info. I had tried everything, including fdisk/MBR, cloning to new hard drive, trying to do new install of OS on fresh drive... all failed, thought motherboard or IDE subsystem was hosed. Resetting CMOS WORKED.

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First answer by Zoe Blessing. Last edit by BobRPC. Contributor trust: 60 [recommend contributor]. Question popularity: 241 [recommend question]

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