Fix the Patriot USB write protected issue

My Patriot USB Memory stick flash drive got stuck in write protected mode. The first glimpse that something was awry I got when using Disk Utility on my MacBook Air. All options were grayed out, except for verify disk. Running it resulted in a message letting me know that the disk needed repair. The repair process in turn gave me a result of Error: -69877: Couldn’t open device. Nice!

Getting a hold of a Windows 7 running PC didn’t yield much better results. Some ...