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sodar79
join:2007-05-03
Cleveland, OH

sodar79

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[hard drive] Western Digital 1tb external hard drive in readonly

I have a 1TB WD external hard drive on my PC running Windows 7. Almost daily the hard drive becomes readonly where I cannot copy anything to the drive.

I have run diskpart and cleared readonly quite a few times but that only works as a temporary solution. Sometimes "attributes disk clear readonly" doesn't work at all.

Any other advice on how to PERMANENTLY remove this readonly mode? I use it as my main source of data. Could it be breaking? Could it be my pc?

Fraoch
join:2003-08-01
Cambridge, ON
SmartRG SR808ac
TP-Link EAP225
Grandstream HT502

Fraoch

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Re: [hard drive] Western Digital 1tb external hard drive in read

I'm a Linux guy so I'm not familiar with Windows 7 - however in Linux if the OS detects something wrong with the drive when it's mounting it, it will attempt to mount the drive in read-only mode rather than just abandon mounting it altogether. Windows 7 may be doing the same thing.

It sounds like the hard drive is failing. Make an immediate backup and post your SMART test results.

El Quintron
Cancel Culture Ambassador
Premium Member
join:2008-04-28
Tronna

El Quintron to sodar79

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to sodar79
I've had a couple of these and some of them can be total lemons, they're usually WD Greens in a proprietary enclosure.

If the drive isn't failing (which you'll have to determine on your own) you might have better luck gutting it from the WD enclosure and put it in a reliable 3rd party enclosure. I've used Vantec and Mediasonic, I prefer the Mediasonic ones.

If I were you, I would back up the drive immediately, and test it later.