Disable Writing to USB Drives in Windows XP and Windows Vista

June 16th, 2008 • Filed Under • by Ramesh Srinivasan

By default users can insert a USB disk in the system and read from, or write to it without limitation. Windows XP Service Pack 2 introduces a new setting which helps system administrators to restrict the ability of users to write to USB storage devices.

Disable writing to USB drives - Windows Vista / XP (SP2 and higher)

1. Launch Regedit.exe and navigate to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SYSTEM \ CurrentControlSet \ Control \ StorageDevicePolicies

(If the StorageDevicePolicies key does not exist already, you need to create it.)

2. Create a new DWORD value named WriteProtect

3. Double-click WriteProtect set its Value data to 1

4. Exit the Registry Editor.

Registry Fix

To automate the above setting, download usbwriteprotect.zip and save it to the desktop. Unzip and extract the files to a folder. Double-click usbwriteprotect.reg to implement the above setting. To reverse the changes, run undo.reg.

With this setting enabled, users will see the error The disk is write-protected. when trying to write to USB disks.

Administrators can implement this setting as part of a security strategy to prevent data theft using USB devices. This setting works fine in Windows XP Service Pack 2 and higher, and in Windows Vista systems as well. For more information, see section StorageDevicePolicies in the Microsoft TechNet site.


Copyright © 2008 Ramesh Srinivasan. All rights reserved.

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