Read-Only

Whilst attempting to manage the drives in Windows’ Disk Management MMC (Microsoft Management Console) plug-in, I accidentally set a logical drive (a RAID1 array on which a volume hosts all Windows’ users’ “My Documents” virtual folder/alias) to “offline”.

I accidentally clicked the “OK” button on the pop-up warning, and could not find a way to cancel the action thereafter.

After the Disk Management MMC plug-in/app appeared to “hang”, I restarted the system normally (i.e. via the Windows UI).

Upon reboot, Disk Management showed the disk as “Read Only”.

Attempting The Fix(es)

Attempting all the various fixes found via Google searches were to no avail i.e.

1. using diskpart via an Administrator command prompt to clear the readonly disk flag, or
2. attempting to create/set a HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\StorageDevicePolicies\WriteProtect DWORD with value “0”).

Attempting to do step #1 simply threw up the error “Diskpart has encountered an error: The media is write protected.” after a long pause.

I tried:

• “Advanced Troubleshooting” via WinRE – and because it didn’t load the RAID drivers, the RAID1 array disk could not be “selected” in diskpart
• clearing the readonly flag repeatedly in “Windows Safe Mode with Command Prompt” using diskpart – and despite showing the disk attributes as “Read-only : No“, rebooting normally would still see the disk “stuck” (in RO mode)

The Fix

What eventually worked was

• in “Windows Safe Mode”:
  • clearing the readonly disk attribute
  • setting the disk “offline“
• booting normally, then using “Disk Management” MMC to set the disk back to “online”

I am assuming this may not work if the boot volume was set to “read only” (but in which case I am assuming first boot will fail already).