Originally Posted by
Bobinovich
I have come across a weird problem twice now and wondered if anyone else had experienced it - if so what their solution was.
When plugging in a USB Flash Drive it is recognised by the Windows XP system but then comes up "F:/, Access Denied". Other USB flash drives do exactly the same, yet work fine on all other XP systems, indicating it's not a problem with the drives themselves.
My guess is it's something to do with drive permissions, or a corruption in the registry. I've uninstalled the respective devices & the related storage volumes from the Device Manager & let Windows re-detect which it does, but still with Access Denied when trying to open them. I've even manually edited the CurrentControlSet in the registry but still the same problem.
When I experienced this the first time I backed up, wiped & reinstalled everything which worked fine, but is a bit extreme just to get certain USB devices to work. However if I have to then I'll do it again - I was just hoping someone may have an idea.
I've had problems with drives before suddenly denying me access and the problem was actually down to group policy not being applied properly at logon to the network. While your computer may not be part of a domain, it could be down to the local machine policy on it. However that would generally restrict all (USB) drives all of the time and not just some of them.
Is this limited to one account or to all of the accounts on the machine? Have you tried to see what happens when you are logged on with the Administrator account and not just an account which is a member of Administrators?
Is there anything in the Event Viewer on the machine to indicate any problems?
If you open the USB icon on the system tray, check the Display Device Components box, select the device (not the volume) and click Properties is there anything in there that's unusual?
What are the drive permissions? Have you reset them and taken ownership of it?
The only other things that springs to mind are:- a corrupted file system on the USB drive, however you'd then expect it to continue to do it even after wiping the machine.
- a corrupted registry and this would explain why it works when you wipe it.
- Virus / spyware restricting access for a laugh.
I'm sure you've checked most of these but thought I'd throw them out there anyway!
Last edited by blueivy; 11-Jan-07 at 21:08.
Kind regards,
Paul Broadwith
Blue Ivy Ltd, Wick - Certified Microsoft Small Business Specialist
Bookmarks