Tech2know

Friends, at time you go to a cyber cafe and find that USB drive is disabled in the system. Well, the trick is not difficult. Its just a matter of changing a value in Windows Registry. Below are the steps :

Disable/Enable USB storage device :

1) Go to Windows ‘Start’ menu –>  click on ‘Run’ –> Regedit and press enter. This will open registry editor.

2) Navigate to follwoing registry entry

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\USBSTOR

3) Double click on Start value name on the right hand side pane. Below window will appear on double clicking Start.

                                                                                                                                                  4) Change the Value data in above window to 4 for disabling USB storage drive access. To enable it, just change value of Value data to 3.

Now, if you do not want to completely disable USB storage device in your system then Windows Vista gives you an option to make USB drive Read-Only. Following are the steps :

1) Go to Windows ‘Start’ menu –>  click on ‘Run’ –> Regedit and press enter. This will open registry editor.

2)Navigate to followoing registry entry

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control

3) Right click on Control and select New and then Key. Create  new key with name StorageDevicePolicies.

4) Right click on StorageDevicePoliciesand select New and then Dword. Create new dword WriteProtect.

5) Double click on WriteProtect and you will see below window.

                                                                                                                                                    6) Change Value data to 1 for making USB drive read only. Once you make it read only, you will not be able to transfer data from your desktop/laptop to USB but vice versa is possible. Revert Value data to 0(zero) to make USB drive read/write accessible.

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