I Cannot Reformat/Erase Flash Drive, Option is Grayed out

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I Cannot Reformat/Erase Flash Drive, Option is Grayed out

Hi I have been looking at a lot of tutorials and I cannot figure out why this is happening on my laptop.

I want to reformat/ erase my Sandisk Cruiser Glide Media 16gb flash drive because It suddenly went into a read-only mode and now I want to erase it completely. My main objective is to delete everyting so maybe the drive will stop being in read-only mode.

When I go to the Disk utility, my options for erasing my flash drive are grayed out (meaning that I cannot click them). Is there a way to work around the Disk Utility menu and erase my flash drive some other way?

What should I do?

See images below

Thanks in advance!

MacBook Pro, OS X Mountain Lion, Laptop is 1 year old

Posted on Dec 30, 2013 3:01 PM

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Answer 1

Niel

Level 10

726,737 points

Dec 30, 2013 3:02 PM in response to tarap303

That suggests that the drive thinks it's going to fail soon. Copy off everything you can and stop using it.

(96405)

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Answer 2

Kappy

Level 10

361,741 points

Dec 30, 2013 3:04 PM in response to tarap303

You aren't selecting the volume. To erase you need to select TARAP FLASH. What you have selected is needed if you want to re-partition the drive. You cannot partition the drive because it is Read-Only.

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Answer 3

tarap303 Author

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Dec 30, 2013 3:07 PM in response to Niel

So I should buy a new flash drive?

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Answer 4

Niel

Level 10

726,737 points

Dec 30, 2013 3:08 PM in response to tarap303

If the Disk Utility won't let you reformat it, yes.

(96407)

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Answer 5

tarap303 Author

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Dec 30, 2013 3:09 PM in response to Kappy

I think the issue still persists

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Answer 6

Mar 2, 2014 5:05 AM in response to tarap303

Did you find a solution to this? Mine is doing the exact same thing. I was able to copy the files but now I just want to erase everything off the USB but Disk Utility won't let me do anything.

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Answer 7

KasperFH

Level 1

19 points

Mar 31, 2014 1:29 AM in response to Niel

Same problem here with a one week old flash drive. Overnight turned to read only, out of the blue.

Replace the flash drive sounds like a lot of bollocks to me. As I said, it's one week old!

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Answer 8

Apr 20, 2014 5:39 AM in response to KasperFH

Same problem here, 3 month old flash drive I use in my phone (samsung)... was able to erase and use without issue prior to a visit to the Apple Store about 2 weeks ago (had the staff help me refresh & reinstall Mavericks) 2009 Macbook Pro (still going strong - no hardware issues).

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Answer 9

Apr 22, 2014 12:13 AM in response to tarap303

Hi all, got mine working again, staff in the Apple store advised that sometimes the SD card slot can slightly push the read/write switch on (ever so slightly) and this renders the SD card unwritable. After they showed me on their store machine that they could access the SD card, I got home and it did take about 5 tries (inserting and ejecting) before I could open and write to the SD card. Hope you're problem is as simple to fix as mine was. 🙂

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