How can I unlock my thumb drives that became locked after file transfers?
Asked by
CuriousCat92
I recently encountered a frustrating issue where two of my thumb drives automatically locked up after I transferred large files to them using my Surface Pro (which has 8GB of RAM). Interestingly, my external hard drive hasn't shown any issues. I've tried using the command prompt to unlock the drives, but it doesn't seem to work. Does anyone have suggestions on how to resolve this?
Answers
It sounds like your thumb drives might have flipped to read-only mode to prevent data loss because they detected an issue. You could try using diskpart to select the drive and clean it, but keep in mind that this will erase all your data. If you need to recover anything, see if you can do that first!
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I've had to play around a bit to unlock drives myself. Sometimes booting with the drive plugged in or using Safe Mode can help. If it doesn't work, run the command prompt commands again, making sure you’re checking everything carefully. It's also good to check if the problem relates to your Surface Pro's handling of these drives during the transfer.
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If nothing else works, you may unfortunately be looking at a low-level format to get your drives functioning again. Just remember that this will wipe everything, so it's a last resort. But it might restore your thumb drives to a usable state.
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DataRescue20: I know it’s a common suggestion, but I’ve seen it not work effectively either. Just be sure to back everything up if you can before cleaning!