Write Protect USB Drive on Windows with Thumbscrew

USB drives have completely replaced CDs and floppies. Most of the users prefer to use USB drive as it is available at cheap price with high storage capacity. USB drives are also becoming medium of spreading of viruses and worms due to auto run functionally of Windows.

Also when you connect your clean USB drive to infect machine your USB drive may get infected and subsequently infecting all the machines on which this USB drive is used. One way to protect and prevent virus spreading via USB drive is by disabling USB drive write meaning making it “read only”.

By default Windows doesn’t provide any option to Write Protect USB drives and you need to edit Windows registry to achieve this. To make it easier for you here is third party freeware tool Thumbscrew.

Thumbscrew allows you to quickly enable or disable writing to all USB mass storage devices on your Windows system. In other words, you can use it to make a USB flash drive, hard drive or IDE / SATA drive in an enclosure read only.

Download Thumbscrew to Enable/Disable USB Drive Write.