Write-protecting an SD card is a great way to avoid accidentally overwriting its contents. However, there are situations that require you to disable write protection. This may need to be done through a physical process or by changing software attributes based on how the card was originally protected.

Physically disabling write-protection is accomplished by moving the small switch that is located on the side of every SD card. There should be an indicator on the card that shows whether the lock is enabled or disabled. Flipping the switch might be all you need to do to fix the issue.

If that does not work, it could be that you can't write to the SD card due to its software attributes being set to read-only. You can use the Windows command line to fix this issue with the following steps.

Open a cmd window and enter the diskpart At the DISKPART prompt, enter the list disk Locate the SD card in the list. It may be the disk that displays a size of zero. Select the disk by its disk number. Once the disk is selected, enter this command: attributes disk clear readonly. The SD card should be able to be read now, as write-protection is disabled.

After removing write-protection so your system recognizes the card, you might find that there is no data accessible on the device. Here's where Disk Drill comes into play. If the card was accidentally formatted or files were lost for another reason, scanning it with Disk Drill is your best chance of recovering your data. It can reconstruct the card's file system and restore access to your valuable files.