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How To Enable and Disable Write Access to USB Drives

14
Dec 2011
14 Dec 2011

I came across an issue the other day with a computer that was received from a company whose domain had been shut down. If you plugged any USB drive into the PC, the PC could see the contents and copy files from it, but it could not write anything to any USB drive. It seemed like it could be some sort of group policy setting.

I checked local group policy first with no luck. Then I did some research on where this setting might be in a domain’s group policy. Unfortunately, the domain was no longer available.

In my research, I found a registry key that can be set to enable or disable write access to a USB drive. I checked the key and found that this had been enabled. Once I changed it back and rebooted, I could write to any drive I plugged into it.

**PLEASE NOTE: EDITING THE REGISTRY CAN BE RISKY AND COULD CAUSE HARM TO YOUR COMPUTER.

Navigate to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\StorageDevicePolicies

Locate the “WriteProtect” dword

If it is set to 1, write protect is enabled. If it is set to 0, write protect is disabled.

I changed the computer’s key to 0 and the writing issues were gone. This trick works for Windows XP SP2 and later as well as Windows Vista. It is not confirmed to work in Windows 7 yet.

Keith Lorenz

Keith Lorenz

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