How do I grant raw disk access to a USB disk for a non-administrator in Windows XP?

Question

I want an account, which can not be in the Administrator group, to have direct access to \\.\PhysicalDrive1, which is an external USB disk. The disk may or may not contain partitions which is recognizable to Windows XP.

I have Administrator access to the machine to make the necessary setup, but I want to keep the user accounts which will do the actual access out of the Administrator group.

The closest information I have encountered regarding this is an article called Setting Device Object Registry Properties After Installation on MSDN, which I reckon could be used to add information to the HKLM\SYSTEM\CCS\Enum\USBSTOR\Disk&Ven_Xxx&Prod_Yyy&Rev_Zz key in the Registry.

Answer 1

Thanks to the magnificent answer by Oleg Kiriljuk to another question (please go and vote him up!), I was able to figure out how to call SetupDiSetDeviceRegistryProperty myself.

Thus, the DskACL utility which provides a command-line front-end was born; the homepage describes how to use it. If anyone is interested in hacking further on it, I've also put up a GitHub repository.