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

by Rohit on June 1, 2008

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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

lock

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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{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }

Shantanu Goel June 2, 2008 at 1:40 am

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

Steve Yu June 2, 2008 at 9:44 pm

Thanks for the mention. :D

Pallab June 6, 2008 at 6:09 am

NIce. I didnt know about this utility.

hisham August 5, 2008 at 1:06 am

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

Sange November 27, 2008 at 9:45 am

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?

K.Aravind Kumar(BE ECE) February 23, 2009 at 8:53 am

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?

renu June 23, 2009 at 2:30 am

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

badogamanav@yahoo.com August 20, 2009 at 8:32 am

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

deep April 7, 2010 at 12:04 pm

my pen drive is no show data but memory show in data
& but i copy the files,photos,songs not show in pen drive [..]

Shruthi April 27, 2010 at 11:06 am

Dear Sir,

From few days whenever i tried to open my pen drive, it gives a message ” drive is not formatted , do you want to format it now”
But i need the data which is stored in the pen drive. its an important data.
Kindly requested to suggest for the best solution.

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