This is quite common question we had received from many readers who wants to make their drive write protected or read only on any public computer so that nothing goes into their drive without permission.

Normally people want to make their removable and other portable drive read only to keep their drive safe from being infected by viruses.

There are lot of viruses which could enter your pen drives through various public computers, but there are many free tools which can help you protect pen drives and other portable drives from viruses and worms which spread through pen drives.

Read Also: Remove Write Protection On USB Pen Drive or Memory Card or iPod 

Let’s discuss all the tools which can make your pen drive read only when ever you want

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

Fix:

There are several free tool in this category which makes any company pen drive or any other portable drive write protected by applying a simple registry hack.

1. Thumbscrew – It is free to use small utility which makes your drive write protected so that any virus, trojan or any other malware cannot enter in your drive.

After downloading the program, you just need to right click the system tray icon to make your drive write protected.

Additional Tip: Problem in formatting pen drive

2. USB Write Protector – It is again a free program which can help you make your pen drive protected, you can carry this utility on your pen drive and make your drive protect with this small free program.

See Also: Protect Folders On USB Pen Drive – Access Denied To Others 

Tip: If your pen drive contains the physical lock you don’t need utilities like these you can make it protected with the physical switch easily.

This content is just a summary, read the full article at ©2010 TroubleFixers - All about fixing computer troubles. All Rights Reserved.

2 Free Tools To Make Removable Drive Read Only is a post from TroubleFixers - All about fixing computer troubles

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

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)

Enable USB Writing ( as shown in the image below )

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.

This content is just a summary, read the full article at ©2010 TroubleFixers - All about fixing computer troubles. All Rights Reserved.

Disable data writing on your USB drive to protect it from viruses is a post from TroubleFixers - All about fixing computer troubles