pbatard
commented
10 years ago then i pressed start button. green bar slowly progressed to ~15% and the i got "write protected" message!
Then, considering that no application is able to write to your drive, it looks like a hardware failure. The flash memory contained on USB pendrives is not everlasting, and, yes, flash drives can fail in a manner where you can read existing data but not write it. Or, most likely, you might have gotten "fake" drives, which report more capacity than they really have, and will fail in the same manner as soon as you exceed the real amount of flash they have (something like 512 MB or 1 GB).
Were the 2 drives you tried from the same manufacturer?
In millions of downloads of Rufus, this is really the only report I have ever gotten of a drive failing with write protected, and, while many people seem to think otherwise, Rufus does not do anything fancy to flash drives: formatting a flash drive is not a risky operation at all, and furthermore, your issue occurred while Rufus was copying files, which it does in a manner that is no different than if you had been using Windows explorer to copy them yourself. I'm pretty confident that that both your drives would have failed the same way if you had stopped Rufus right after it was done with the NTFS formatting, and then copied the files yourself using 7-zip or something else to extract the content from the ISO.
So really, if the 16 GB you used were from the same manufacturer, my best guess is that both your drives are fake. Was it the first time you copied more than 512 MB or 1 GB of data to any of them (fake drive are designed to look OK when formatting or as long as you don't copy too much data - it's only when you attempt to write more actual data than they can hold that they will reveal themselves as fakes)?
This being said, I'm also trying to analyse other possibilities, just in case:
The first thing I'm trying to do right now is get my hands on the Win7AIO-SP1-x64-Mar2014.iso to confirm that it works as expected with a trusted 16 GB drive.
The other thing that I'd like to ask you to do, and that won't require you to attempt to use another actual flash drive, is to create a 16 GB VHD (Virtual Hard Drive) in Windows, and use Rufus 1.4.7 ALPHA (the first version to support VHDs), to see what happens if you try to copy your ISO there. As it is a virtual hard drive, even if you get the write protected issue, it won't matter.
In Windows 7, you can easily create a VHD of any size by launching "Computer Management" in Administrative Tools (from the Control Panel) and then left click on "Disk Management" under Storage on the left handside (so that it refreshes the list of disks), select any disk on the right handside, and then right click on "Disk Management" on the left handside, where you will be able to select "Create VHD". From there you can tell Windows to create a 16 GB to be used as a VHD, which Rufus 1.4.7 will detect and let use use as a flash drive.
Can you please try that and let me know how it goes?
EDIT: Rufus 1.4.7 ALPHA can be downloaded from here.
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hello for first time, i have tried to make an bootable usb drive from an +5GB .iso file. i have used default settings of everything and chose my iso file and usb drive, then i pressed start button. green bar slowly progressed to ~15% and the i got "write protected" message! after that i tried and did repeat the process but now, always i am getting this error at the very beginning! i can't post full log of when this problem happened, because i have had not saved log when this happened, but this is full log of now which give me error at the beginning ....
from after that, i can perfectly fine copy the few file that rufus copied to usb drive, from usb to hdd but i can not copy anything to usb, neither i can delete anything from usb or format it!
now even "delete" is absent in right-click menu!
i am getting this damn "write-protected" error from all the programs that i have tried so far! in this picture i was trying to copy a picture file to usb V
(http://ddlw.org/img/303xvz5s.jpg)
after that i thought maybe this usb drive, accidentally in the same time that i used rufus, failed due to hardware problems, so i tried another 16GB usb drive and exactly same thing happened!
so two 16GB usb drives of mine got faulty this way!
how may i correct this? (i am really frustrated.)