THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\UsbStor\Start is set to 3 (not 4, so that means it must happen outside of windows o/s).

If you have admin rights to your computer, you could change the registry if it is indeed a policy that needs to be changed.

This location in the registry may have a dword of 00000001 which has it as read-only. If you change it to 00000000, it should be read/write. You will need to reboot.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\StorageDevicePolicies]

dword:00000000

I forgot to add this piece of info. The dword value is WriteProtect with value data of 1 or 0.

And some additional info can be found here (it is the same for XP, Vista, and 7):

http://www.helpwithwindows.com/WindowsXP/tune-28.html

It’s actually set to 0. 

So, that’s not it.  But I appreciate the hint.

I did notice that CITRIX created some USB log file this morning.  So, that might be the software that’s causing the issue.

Do you have admin access to the box? If not, I would recommend sharing your local hard drive to a VM you do have admin access to and using the USB drive via the VM. Or reboot your system with a Linux live CD and then plug in the USB drive (should be auto mounted by most modern Linux distros).

If you do have admin access, first step would be to identify what’s preventing you from writing to it. It doesn’t sound like it’s group policy. I’m not sure what Citrix product would do it but maybe there’s something in the Windows event logs about what’s causing the problem.

Personally, I would review the IT Dept’s AUP and determine if it is worth risking your job over tinkering with a company asset.

I realize this is a bit late, and possibly too simple, but some flash drives have a physical lock switch on them, so that could be it.

The admin at the office intentionally disabled all flash drives on all computers so that they are read-only.

The question being asked is how to override whatever it is that was done.  And to do that, the question is how to find out what it is that they did.

The registry was not affected, at least insofar as the two settings that I checked above.

If the flash drive itself is read-only, rather than some setting in Windows treating it as such, I’d think you could easily erase and reformat the drive if you have access to a friend with a Mac. My memory may be off, but I seem to recall doing this a few years ago without any issues other than maybe entering the Mac administrator password.

I guess another option, if you’re allowed, is simply to use a Dropbox account, which provides 2 GB for free. Even if you can’t install the software on your work machine, maybe the site isn’t blocked, and the web interface does allow uploads and downloads.

http://www.dropbox.com

The USB port used to be fine, and then Monday morning plugging in the flash drive was read-only.

It was some software setting somewhere.  The flash drive itself is writable at home.

At the office, they pushed some software.