I bought a usb flash drive to transfer files to and from work. Over xmas I took it with me and was using it at my parents house to transfer files to their machines, and suddenly it started playing up. It suddenly locked. I wasn't able to unlock the permissions from the computer I was using then, but when I put it back into my laptop I was able to unlock it, then go back to the 2nd machine and use it again. Next day though it locked again, and now I just can't unlock it. Is there any way to force the permissions back? When I use 'get info' on my laptop I can 'unlock' the drive. It has me as the owner and says group: wheel has read& write access also. No idea what this is. Despite this though when I try to modify the files or add to the disk it gives me a disk locked error -even though get info shows me having unlocked the &*^%$# thing.
Any ideas gurus?
Regards,
Mark

*bump* Anyone, anyone? (Ferris Bueler's day off)

It doesn't have a little switch or something that locks it on the flash drive itself? I did that a while back and couldn't work out why I was unable to tranfer data on the drive. Can you reformat the drive - either on a Mac, or PC?

JB

It does have a little switch thingy on the side, but it has never done anything. When I first got it I tried switching it back & forth to see what happens, but it made no difference (it wasn't clearly labelled lock/ unlock -although that is what it is meant to be). When this problem appeared I tried switching that over and re-inserting the drive, but again it made no difference.
I also tried the reformat idea (the data on it at the moment isn't important any more) but neither osX, os9, or Windoze XP allows me to modify the drive (says it write proteced in XP and os9, and in osX tells me I don't have premission). When I change permissions in osX it makes no difference! Although the Get Info window says I now have permission (disk is unlocked) I can't modify it.
Very frustrating.

If several machines (Windows and OS X) reckons its write-protected, my guess is that the write-protect switch is broken and is stuck on read-only. What model is the flash drive?

From what I can tell, the flash drive is formatted to FAT and thus any Windows machine will ignore the file permissions and let you do anything with the disk.

Yeah, after everything else I've tried I think it must be that rotten little switch too. I'll send it back. Lucky it has a 12month replacement warranty. Phew!
Thanks for help everyone.
regards,
Mark