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Why did my flash drive become "read only" and (how) can I fix it?

Fresh3 days ago
Mar 15, 2026174866 views
Confidence Score1%
1%

Problem

I have a brand new flash drive (one week old) that has become marked as read only, by Windows, Kubuntu and a bootable partitioner. Why did this happen? Is it fixable? If it is, how can I fix this? The problem Firstly, this drive is new. It's certainly not been used enough to die from normal wear and tear, though I would not discount defective components. The drive itself has somehow become locked in a read only state. Windows' Disk management: Diskpart: What really confuses me is and . Attempted solutions So far, I've tried: Formatting it in Windows (in Disk management, the format options are greyed out when right clicking). DiskPart Clean ( ): There was nothing in the event log. Windows command line format Windows chkdsk: see below for details Kubuntu fsck (through VirtualBox USB passthrough): see below for details Acronis True Image to format, to convert to GPT, to destroy and rebuild MBR, basically anything: failed (could not write to MBR) Details (and a nice story) Background This…

Error Output

Generic Flash Disk USB Device
Disk ID: 33FA33FA
Type   : USB
Status : Online
Path   : 0
Target : 0
LUN ID : 0
Location Path : UNAVAILABLE
Current Read-only State : Yes
Read-only  : No
Boot Disk  : No
Pagefile Disk  : No
Hibernation File Disk  : No
Crashdump Disk  : No
Clustered Disk  : No

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Fix for: Why did my flash drive become "read only" and (how) can I fix it?

Low Risk

You can try to use a tool from the chip manufacturer Alcor. You can find it via Google, the name is " ". There, you first open LoadDriver.exe and enter your VID and PID (you can find out these values by using ChipGenius, or using Linux and typing "lsusb -v") and click install. For my stick the values were , . Then you run AlcorMP.exe where your device should be listed. A click on the button left of it, and then Start does a low level format and bad block scan on your stick.

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