‘Disk is write protected’ error in external Hard Drive

Recently I bought a new external Hard Drive but had issues with it on my work computer. I connected the drive but was not able to access it. Every time I tried to access the drive it gave me an error saying "Disk is write protected". I formatted the drive but could not access it. I searched for this error on the Internet and most of the sites talked about a switch that needs to be changed to resolve this problem.

My hard drive does not have a single switch on it and even the supplier wasn't able to resolve it. After doing lot of research I came to know about settings in the registry editor. Following are the changes done in the registry editor to resolve the write protection error issue. Hope this would be helpful for someone who is facing this weird issue:

1. Click Start->Run.

2. Type regedit and click OK.

3. Save your registry settings by clicking file > Export > save. This is the bacup taken in case something messes up.

4. Open HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE by clicking on the + sign next to it.

5. Open SYSTEM by clicking the plus sign next to it.

6. Open CurrentControlSet.

7. Open Control.

8. Open StorageDevicePolicies

9. Right click on WriteProtect and click modify.

10. If the value data is 1 change it 0 and click ok.

11. Repeat steps 7 to 10 for ControlSet001 and ControlSet002 .

12. Close Registry editor and its done. You might have to reboot.