My external hard drive is write protected?

Factual Questions
1

I recently moved to Germany and brought a bunch of stuff with me on an external hard drive. I wasn’t sure if it would work here because of the power supply, but it supports 90V to 240V, so I got a European power cord and it worked fine. At first I was just copying files, and I didn’t have any problems, but then when I tried to save a file to the hard drive it said ‘The disk is write protected. Remove the write-protection or use another disk’. I can’t move or delete files either. I looked for a hardware write protection switch, but I don’t see one. I know memory sticks usually have those. Couldn’t see anything in the drive’s Properties in Windows either. Could be the drive was just damaged in transit, I guess.

It’s a FAT32, USBII hard drive. I’ve tried it on 32bit and 64bit XP.

Any ideas?

2

There’s a registry hack available at the How To Geek site.

Scroll down and look for the Enable USB Write link.