Otaqui.com Blog

Device Media Is Write Protected

Having recently bought usb memory key I was having trouble getting it to mount correctly on my Windows machine at work. It would occasionally return a ‘device media not recognized’ error on insertion, and sometimes would seemingly mount but never display in My Computer. I downloaded the HP USB Drive Format tool, which again sort of seemed to see the drive, but whenever I tried to format it I would get the ‘Device media is write protected’ error.

After a bit of searching and some guess work I realised that the key was being assigned a drive letter that was already in use by a network drive (we have a lot of network drives in the office, and I had run out of letters). The HP Utility was trying to format the network drive!

The solution was to safely remove the key and power down completely. Then insert the key and reboot – accepting that Windows will warn you about not being to mount all network drives, since it will have already mounted the key drive. Once that’s done you can assign whatever letter you DO have free, and then when you reboot Windows will remember the letter assignation and you are sorted for (un-)mounting to your heart’s content.

Possibly worth noting that the usb key worked flawlessly with my mac throughout.