If you have an old USB hard drive or similar and want to deletes files from it, you may get a "write-protected" message. This can be that you are running a different version of Windows, an example is that your computer is using windows 7 64 bit and the USB hard drive was formatted on a 32 bit version of XP.
To fix this you can try the following:
1. Open a Command prompt by clicking Start, typing command, and clicking Command Prompt.
2. Type diskpart and press Enter.
3. Type list volume and press Enter.
4. Type select volume #, where # is the number of the drive that's giving you t