I have an external HDD that I use to store various files and products that I download.  Today, while downloading one such application my computer decided to freeze.  I've been having a sporatic issue with my hardware lately, so this freeze (while not entirely unexpected) happened at a most inopportune moment.

When my computer 'came-to' after rebooting, my HDD was put into a read-only state.  Any change I tried to make to the drive was greeted with a "The media is write protected" error message.  The only fix I could come up with was the following:

1. Open the command prompt.
2. Type DISKPART
3. LIST VOLUME (to identify the volume in question)
4. SELECT VOLUME # (where # represents the volume identifier)
5. ATTRIBUTES VOLUME CLEAR READONLY

After this, I could select the folders on my drive and unmark their read-only state.  Note that I had to clear the read-only flag even though DISKPART reported the volume as not being read-only.

We'll see whether the drive falls back into its read-only state in the future.