Write Protection on External Hard drive

[ShortSxit]

Hey everyone,

I'm having a weird issue. I have an external hard drive that I use for work. It was working fine up until yesterday when all of a sudden it became write protected. I checked the security and it says that there is no write protection and that I should have full access.

I've read that these Western Digital drives sometimes do that, and that there's software you can download, or as a last resort, you can reformat. Neither of those are options for me because this is a work hard drive, so I don't have admin access and I can't lose this data.

I've tried restarting, using different USB ports, checked security tabs, etc. Now here's what makes it even weirder: if I plus the hard drive into a different computer, it works fine.

I can probably work on my home computer and transfer some data with a flash drive, but this will only work as a very temporary solution. I have databases that are several gigs, data coming from various sources (that I can only get on my work laptop), etc. that I need to have centralized on one computer.

Soooooo, has anybody ever heard of a hard drive having write protection suddenly turn on, but only when being plugged into a specific computer? And does anybody have any ideas on how to solve this? Maybe it's actually something that happened to the laptop that's making write protection turn on?

Thanks for any help.

[ShortSxit]

Update: I forgot I have an external hard drive for my personal desktop. I tried plugging that into my work laptop and I had the same problem...the drive showed up as write protected.

So 1) The issue is with the laptop, not the hard drive.
and 2) I won't be able to work from my home computer because I can't transfer the files I need to my home computer .

Again, any help would be appreciated.