How to Fix Seagate External Hard Drive Write-Protected

Issue: Seagate External Hard Drive Is Write-Protected

“Cannot suddenly write to all external Seagate drives. I have been using these drives for years, but today have the error. All software is up to date. This has strangely happened to all 4 external drives, there are no protected files, nor storage issues.”answers.microsoft.com

“Seagate external hard drive write-protected” or “Seagate external hard drive read only Windows 10” is an annoying issue that is troubling many users. It prevents you from editing and formatting the external hard drive. In the following part, we will assist you in addressing this problem.

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Fixes to Seagate External Hard Drive Write-Protected

Fix 1. Take Full Control of the Disk via Disk Properties

Facing a write-protected drive, the first thing you need to do is to make sure your account has full control permission to the disk. Here you can see how to change permissions on Seagate external hard drive via disk properties.

Step 1. In File Explorer, right-click the Seagate external hard drive and select Properties.

Step 2. In the pop-up window, move on to the Security tab, then click Edit.

Step 3. Next, select Everyone or your user name, then tick the option of Full control under Allow.

Step 4. Finally, click Apply > OK. Now, you can try to write to the disk and check if the drive is not write-protected.

Fix 2. Remove Read-Only Attribute via CMD

It is also an effective and easy way to remove the read-only attribute in Seagate’s external hard drive by using CMD. The steps are as follows.

Step 1. Run Command Prompt as administrator.

Step 2. In the Command Prompt window, type the following commands. You need to press Enter after each command.

• diskpart
• list disk
• select disk * (* represents the write-protected Seagate external hard drive number)
• attributes disk clear readonly

Once all the command lines are executed, the Seagate external hard drive should become normal without write protection.

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Fix 3. Make Use of Windows Registry

Also, you can remove disk write protection by changing Windows registry values.

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Here are the major steps to remove write protection via Windows Registry Editor.

Step 1. Press the Windows + R key combination to bring up the run window. Next, type regedit and click OK.

Step 2. In Registry Editor, navigate to this location:

Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control

Under Control, select StorageDevicePolicies. In the right panel, double-click the WriteProtect value, set up the value data to 0, and click OK.

If there is no StorageDevicePolicies option under Control, you can right-click Control and select New > Key. Then, rename the newly created key to StorageDevicePolicies.

Next, select StorageDevicePolicies. In the right panel, right-click any blank space and choose New > DWORD (32-bit) Value. Sequentially, rename the newly created value to WriteProtect. After that, double-click WriteProtect, specify its value data to 0, and click OK.

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Fix 4. Turn off BitLocker

You are unable to read or write to an external hard drive with BitLocker encrypted before entering the password. This may be the reason why the Seagate external hard drive is write-protected. To rule out this cause, you can decrypt the drive by entering the password or turning off BitLocker.

See Also: BitLocker Decryption Not Working on Windows 10/11

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Wrapping Things Up

Reading here, you should not worry about the matter of “Seagate external hard drive write-protected” on Windows. Hope the approaches listed above are beneficial to you.

If you need any help from the MiniTool support team, please contact us via [email protected].