You can enable/disable USB port of PC / Laptop in BIOS setting. This will prevent and restrict computer users from accessing any external storage devices (flash drive, memory cards, pen drives, portable hard disks) and external action devices like keyboard, mouse, scanners, printers, web cams and such, through the USB port.

The advantage of this is, you restrict users from copying and transferring sensitive data to and from the computer. This is mostly a necessity in: offices to protect intellectual property and cybercafe / public browsing centers to prevent users from knowingly or unknowingly infecting the system with viruses.

Now what if you’d want to block only the storage devices and not keyboards, mouse and other media devices from accessing the system ? This is not possible with the BIOS setup changes, however there is a work around for this, which can be achieved by hacking the registry:

Here’s how you can disable USB storage device drive access in windows :

1> Click on “Start –> Run –> Type regedit and hit Enter.”

2> Navigate to “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\UsbStor”

3> Select the key UsbStor and double click on the Start value, which can be found in the right pane.

4> In Value data part, put 4 (numeric value four), if you want to disable USB storage and put in 3 (numeric value 3), if you want to enable USB storage on your computer.

How To Disable/Enable USB Removable Mass Storage Device Drive Access in Windows

The change will be effective immediately, however sometimes a reboot may be required. This hack will ensure that all the USB storage devices are disabled / blocked or enabled according to your choice. This works fine on most Windows operating systems such as XP, Vista, Windows server 2000, 2003, and 2008.

If you are not sure how to edit Registry files and are not comfortable dealing with them, download these zip files which contain .reg files. Once you extract the content of these zip files on to your local system, double click on the file and click OK to the warning prompt, and the registry changes will be made automatically.

Download DisableUSBDrive.reg
Download EnableUSBDrive.reg

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17 COMMENTS

  1. The USB devices, DVD read or write is disable by administrator, I have tried the usual method Registry entry, Group policy edit, i did not find any thing usefull. This laptop have symantec and bitlocker, I am not sure which is blocking what any help is welcome

  3. pleace can you help me out with this i cant do it is still Disable can you show me how to do this i am haveing a lot of trouble

  5. Hi,
    I have tried those steps, but unable to access UBS device.

    I believe the USb port has been disabled by IT guys from BIOS setting.

    Can you please tell me is there any other way or any patch available to enable it again by myself.

    Thanks.

  10. I have a 32 g.b. pen drive which had 32 FAT file system.It displayed ditorted version of copied programme.So,I formatted it .On formatting, the file system was convertet into raw file system,so ,again I formatted it with HDDGURU LLF TOOL.Now, on connecting the pen drive into USB PORT,it is not detected .Kindly , help me.
    NAKUL SINGH

  12. I am running Vista, my USB CD & camera disk shows up on my hard drive, but it does not give me the option anymore to download it onto my computer. I there fore have to copy and paste my photos can you help me? thanks Margaret

  16. how to disable write protection on my Generic USB Mass Storage Device. My Pqi 4.0 Gb usb flash was locked by write protection and I cannot delete or add data anymore and mark as write protected

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