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I have a 1TB external USB HD (My Book Essential Edition 2.0), and recently I've been having a nasty little issue with it. After partitioning it out it seems to sporadically showing up as write protected, preventing me of course from adding/changing anything to that partition. The other partitions seem to work fine during this occurrence. Initially I noticed this when mounting an encrypted partition using TrueCrypt (TrueCrypt mounts the encrypted partition under a separate drive letter when it decrypts it), I wrote this off as a little bug with TrueCrypt as I noticed dismounting and remounting fixed the issue.

Later, however, I got the same message telling me that a separate (non-encrypted) partition on the drive was write protected. As the partition was new and had little on it I just copied the files over to another partition, deleted the partition and remade it, fixing the problem. This is a very troubling issue as doing little work arounds like that are obviously a huge pain. I doubt very seriously that TrueCrypt is playing a role in this as the second partition to act up like this was untouched by it.

As far as my OS I'm using Vista 64bit. I've used the drive previously (unpartitioned) under XP 32bit without any issues like this, and it has been running flawlessly under Vista 64bit until recently after the partitioning out of the drive. Below is the partitioning setup if that info could be of any help.

Partition 1 - 100GB (NTFS)*
Partition 2 - 250GB (NTFS)*
Partition 3 - 250GB (NTFS)*
Partition 4 - 100GB (NTFS)*
Partition 5 - 50GB (NTFS)
Partition 6 - 50GB (NTFS)*
Partition 7 - 100GB (NTFS)*
(31.51GB Free Space)

*These partitions are encrypted.

Anybody help me out on this? It's becoming a major pain.

when did you start to encrypt it and why would you do that? you can partition it another way you know. did you right click it and uncheck the write protected box?
im not sure as to vista, all i know is that vista stinks(no offense) but vista is one of the biggest misstakes microsoft made.

win xp is making more money then vista, thats why they are discontinuing XP
so they will Force people to buy vista.

im not paying for it (my version is pireted).

I encrypted it after I added the drive to the new system. The issue, however, the issue is also present on partitions of the drive that are not encrypted.


To secure the contents.

I'm sure there are several methods to partition out drives, I just used the built in utility with Window's Disk Management.

Not 100% sure which box you mean. If you're referring to the option in TrueCrypt to mount the drive as read-only, I always make sure that box is unchecked.

No, not the box on the program, right click the drive in My Computer and click Property's.

Vista is a little off from XP, don't think we're seeing the same options. I've explored most of the drive options I can and haven't found an option to alter the write protection on the partions. This is my first run at Vista though so I'm probably missing something.

id just reformat and install XP pro SP2

Already running XP on a dual boot, but I need something that's 64bit and capable of using all of my memory/processor.

what does 64-bit do exactly? and 36 bit or what ever, can handle up to 4gb ram

Really rather focus on my hard drive issue than defend Vista, I think discussions along those lines have their own forum.

sorry, anyways, i have 3 500gb ext. hdd's and they seem to work just fine.
of course i dont use encrypters.

Yeah the HD was working great until I partioned it. I don't think the encryption has anything to do with it since the partions that aren't encrypted are having the same issues. I think it has something to do with how the partions are being loaded/mounted as remounting them or rebooting seems to fix the issue.

I dont know...
maybe try another program.
have you scanned for Virus's and Spyware, etc?