Hard Drive

I have a 1TB external hard drive. It was working fine until yesterday. I can not delete files from it or add any on, and it says they are write protected, but I am the Admin on the PC and no where in properties does it say anything about the disk being read-only.

Anyone know how to get it back to normal without reformating?

Try unplugging the drive and let it sit for a few and reboot your computer without it. Then shut down your computer, plug the drive back in and let the computer recognize it again and see if that works

Also check the bios to see if it has write protection in it.

Or try a CMOS reset

USB? Try plugging into another computer and see if you have the same issue. You probably have the drive formatted as NTFS, and something has altered the security permissions on the drive or folder you are trying to access. As an administrator, you should be able to reset all permissions from the drive root down through all subfolders, using the Security tab on the drive properties.

It is exFAT. And there is no Security tab, this is Vista. If I try and decheck "Archive" on the files, I get "The media is write protected".

Guess I assumed XP since it seems almost everybody here still has a misguided hatred of Vista. )

exFAT, ouch, that makes it harder to test on non-Vista systems then. It also precludes security settings since filesystem permissions aren't supported yet either. BTW Vista still has the Security tab for NTFS drives, it just doesn't for exFAT drives since Vista doesn't support exFAT permissions yet.

I've avoided exFAT so far, so I'm not going to be any help. It sounds like maybe the exFAT support drivers possibly got hosed. exFAT was introduced in Vista SP1 -- I don't recall if it's possible to reinstall SP1, but maybe that's an option. Otherwise I'd try to find someone with Vista SP1 to see if it's a problem with just your OS, or with the drive itself.

Whatever floats your boat, but I'd also question why you want to go with exFAT for a large external drive, especially with support so limited. Although exFAT supports large filesystems, it was primarily designed for flash drives and other small capacity external drives because of it's low overhead -- in fact exFAT debuted with Windows CE 6.0 for mobile/embedded devices for that reason, and I expect support was added to Vista so it could access CE devices. For a large filesystem -- especially a 1TB drive -- I think NTFS would not only be better suited, but probably more performant, and certainly more portable for access on non-Vista systems. Just my $0.02...

I need it to store files over 6GB, and NTFS does not allow that, so I went with FAT, which turned out to be exFAT. I guess I could reformat, but if that does not fix the issue I guess I could start using my XP laptop to house the hard drive on.

[quote8347dc40d1="TryinToGetPaid"]I need it to store files over 6GB, and NTFS does not allow that, [/quote8347dc40d1]
Huh? Not true at all. If that were the case, NTFS would barely be better than FAT32, which was capped at 4GB file sizes. I have many, many files >6GB on my NTFS drives. I have some over 100GB.

NTFS supports files up to 16EB (Exabytes), or 16 quintillion bytes, in size. Not sure where you got the 6GB number, as it doesn't come up anywhere in NTFS specs. There is a 4GB limitation on the [i8347dc40d1]number[/i8347dc40d1] of files that can be stored on one volume -- and I'm reasonably confident you don't have over [i8347dc40d1]4 billion[/i8347dc40d1] files on your drive. ;)

Strange, all NTFS drives I have used tell me that the file is too large to place on the drive, I format to FAT, and then it works. So uhm Ima try what you said, and go back to NTFS and let cha know....