How to Make USB Read-Only

Do you want to set your USB drive to read-only? There can be a variety of reasons why you may want to do this, such as working in an IT repair shop and wanting to protect your tools from virus-infected computers. Or, you may simply want to protect your files from being removed or changed by anyone. Regardless of the reason, it is a quick and easy process that can be done in a few simple steps.

Firstly, you will need to go to the start menu and right-click it to go to the disk management. From there, you can figure out which drive is your USB drive and its letter. This will be useful as you proceed with the next steps.

Next, open the command prompt and run it as an administrator. Type in “disk part” and then “list disk” to verify which disk you are working with. Once you have confirmed that it is the correct disk, you can select it and then type in “attributes disk” to see its attributes. At this point, you will notice that read-only is set to “no”. To change this, type in “attributes disk set read-only” to successfully set the drive as a read-only drive.

You can now verify that the USB drive is read-only by checking that there is no possibility to create new folders. If you try to edit a file and save it, you will receive a message that the media is right protected. To remove the read-only status, type in “attributes disk clear read-only”.

That’s it! It’s a simple process that can be done by entering a quick command in the command prompt. Now you can protect your files or tools from being removed or infected by any malware.