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I am currently having a problem enabling a CD rom and USB drive on a work machine.

Some background - Because of the sensitive data within the workplace, by default, all USB and CD drives are locked down.

  1. There is no provisioning server that pushes out scripts to do this.

  2. I have tried the following. -regedit, H_KEY_LOCAL_MACHINE > Current Control Set > Servers > USBStor/CDROM, and changing the specific value to the correct number (it was infact already on 4).. -MMC snap-in - adding the local group policy, and then ensuring that USB mass storage is enabled (it wasn't disabled) -Device Manager - here is where it gets tricky. If I Insert removeable media, I can see it in device manager, showing as disabled, when I rick click and enable, it enables for two seconds (so that I get a pop up asking if I would like to view files on the USB etc) and then quickly flashes back to disabled

Is there anything I am doing wrong that you can think of? Is there a way to do this from the command line to override all of these settings?

I have admin privalages, and a good few machines on the network have USB and CD rom enabled, but they have absolutely no difference in settings (except in device manager of course, where the drives do not show as disabled)..

Any help appreciated, close to pulling my hair out here

2 Answers 2

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I'm sure this isn't the answer you were expecting but if they were by default disabled in device manager, and they go back to disabled even after you've enabled them, then there probably is some sort of server enforcing that, and you enabling them might log your machine somewhere. In a lot of workplaces it is quite common to have something like active directory or something to enforce permissions and access rights on computers. So if the company really doesn't want you to plug in removable media (they might be scared it carries a virus, and like you said, sensitive data) the only other way I could think of doing it is to turn off the computer, and see if booting off USB is an option. Upon bootup, there are no permissions, and most companies probably won't go through the hassle of locking up the BIOS of each machine within their company. So you can try installing a light version of Linux on a USB flash drive, boot from it, and when started, create a directory to mount your work partition (some distros do that for you, some don't), and your USB flash drive to another and copy over files as desired, and reboot back into Windows when done. Just don't get in trouble.

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Mostly this problem will be solved when we uninstall and reinstall the drivers in device manager.

You can enable the CD rom through command. Run CMD as administrator and run this command to enable CD rom

reg add HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\cdrom /t REG_DWORD /v "Start" /d 1 /f

. To disable run this command

reg add HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\cdrom /t REG_DWORD /v "Start" /d 4 /f

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