Disable data writing on your USB drive to protect it from viruses

Posted by Rohit in virus problems 

1

Jun

Trouble:

Majority of the virus problem which we receive from the readers are those cases which infect the system through pen drives. According to our records about 40 percent of the total computer systems got virus or trojan infection through pen drives and USB portable devices like iPOd, Mp3 players etc.

 

Yesterday, I found a cool utility called Thumbscrew : USB Write Blocker , you can use this utility to disable writing to your USB drive. You can read full review about the utility here

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Let’s see how can you use this utility to protect your drive from viruses


Fix:

Thumbscrew is small handy utility which you can take any where on your pen drive use it to protect your pen drive from viruses on other computer systems by disabling Writing on that system. You can download thumbscrew here.

 

Follow the procedure below to protect your pen drive from viruses

 

1. In order to protect your pen drive from viruses you need to create a blank file named autorun.inf through notepad and place it in the root directory.

 

2. When you insert pen drive on any virus infected computer system it will throw a message that some thing is trying to copy and replace a file located in the root directory of your USB device and that is nothing but a virus.

So don’t allow the virus to replace the file on your drive.

 

3. Open your pen drive and double click the thumbscrew.exe to start it , it will get loaded into your system tray.

 

Select the option as shown in the images below

 

Disable USB Writing ( as shown in the image below)

disable-usb-writing

Enable USB Writing ( as shown in the image below )

enable-usb-writing

 

Caution:

Make sure to enable USB writing before you remove your pen drive from the computer as this small utility plays with the registry which affects the computer not your pen drive on which you have inserted your pen drive.

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Author + Admin: Rohit Khurana
Software Engineer by profession. I am a part time tech blogger and believe in blogging because I enjoy writing on technology. I also write about Cars and Bikes at www.carblogindia.com. You can catch me on twitter @rohit_khurana. Get in touch with me at RohitKhurana.in.

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10 Users Commented In This Post

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Shantanu Goel says, June 2nd, 2008   

That is so cool. I’m always worried about giving my usb drive to someone for just this reason..Thanks for the info, Rohit.

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Steve Yu says, June 2nd, 2008   

Thanks for the mention. :D

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Pallab says, June 6th, 2008   

NIce. I didnt know about this utility.

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Solutions to Top 10 USB Pen Drive Problems - TroubleFixers - All about fixing computer troubles says, August 4th, 2008   

[...] USB Device has Malfunctioned: This one of the unusual warnings which you get sometimes, the solutions to this problems sounds silly, but it works, see the solution here. [...]

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hisham says, August 5th, 2008   

i have a dell case without a power supply it is a tower case i fixed a power supplu but not the original one the turn on i installed windows but now when i turn the case on it starts for a while and shutdown plz help me

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Sange says, November 27th, 2008   

my pen drive shows an error report as ” the disk cannot be written because it is write protected. please remove the write protection” and neither i can write on it nor i can delete the data from it.
can you please tell what the problem is?

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K.Aravind Kumar(BE ECE) says, February 23rd, 2009   

my pen drive shows an error report as ” the disk cannot be written because it is write protected. please remove the write protection” and neither i can write on it nor i can delete the data from it.
can you please tell what the problem is?

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renu says, June 23rd, 2009   

USB drive has malfunctioned and the printer does not work properly.

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badogamanav@yahoo.com says, August 20th, 2009   

Dear Sir,

when i tried to open my usb flash drive, it gives a message ” drive is not formatted , do you want to format it now”
but if i clik it shows “windows was unable to complete this format” when i close the window another msg came up “the disk drive can not be formatted”. I noticed one more changes I can’t see the capacity of my drive in formating window.

I will appreciate if you send me the solution on my email

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Disable Cut, Copy, Paste, Move and Delete Of Your Files In Windows With Prevent says, September 17th, 2009   

[...] // There can be some instances when you may not want other to copy and paste certain files and folders in windows, but you know your friends who might try to copy those files and folders to their USB pen drives or might try to delete them in some cases. In that case Prevent is free to use utlity which lets you block or disable copy, cut,paste, delete in windows. We had written about how to copy paste text across LAN Network and how to disable copy paste on USB Drive    [...]

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