So this year, one of our programmers got the NI LabVIEW USB flash drive, even though we just used the online installer. Now that the season is over and we are changing languages, we really have no use for the flash drive. Seeing that it’s a decent sized external drive, I tried to reuse it, but found that it was read-only. After about an hour of online searching to try to remove the write-protection on it, nothing seemed to work. Does anyone have any ideas on how to remove the write-protection and reuse it?
Does formatting it work?
It’s possible it is a hardware lock, but usually there’d be a switch and I can’t see NI bothering with the extra cost of that hardware.
I don’t get the LabVIEW flashdrive, so I can’t look at one.
You may even have to pop the case open - there may be a physical slider switch that makes it read only. Though I’d be shocked if that’s the case.
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Formatting does not work, and there is no visible switch on the flash drive.
Interesting - I use the 2019 one as my go-to just fine. It was a completely different model though.
I’d volunteer to try with our 2022 one, but it’s at the school and I don’t think I can get in until September.
Have you tried formatting from a non-Windows computer? I’ve found even passing drives through a VM to something like GParted Live tends to be more successful at reformatting drives in my experience.
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I got a LabVIEW flash drive for work (i.e., non-FRC) back in 2018 (?) and spent an hour or so poking into it. I think I figured out that NI was using a special model of flash drive that could be locked or unlocked using software tools only available from that specific vendor. Basically, I concluded that it wasn’t worth spending hours of my time for a 16G flash drive.
EDIT: Definitely 2018. I know, because I found this facebook post:
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Ah, that’s unfortunate. Thank you for the help though.
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