USB Thumb drive drivers needed

[FastRedPonyCar]

Ugh, in an attempt to thwart users from bringing viruses from home the higher ups have made USB drivers absent on the machines now. So basically, when anyone plugs in any USB storage media, it asks you for drivers.

I've downloaded every driver here.

http://www.usb-drivers.com/companies/667.htm?acd=3&rvd=5&thx=9&bng=7&o=5

I've tried looking on the XP disk and it still keeps coming back saying that it couldn't find the drivers.

any help? I looked through the group policy on one of the machines and didn't find anything saying USB drives can't be used or installed. No custom policies defined at least.

[AthlonXP1800]

What the USB thumb drive brand and model?

[nekrosoft13]

knowing brand won't help, XP like most recent OS handle all USB by class, USB thumb drive is Mass Storage class.

inf file that handles USB Mass Storage Class installation is in C:\WINDOWS\inf\usbstor.inf

[Version]
Signature="$CHICAGO$"
Class=USB
ClassGUID={36FC9E60-C465-11CF-8056-444553540000}
provider=%MSFT%
LayoutFile=LAYOUT.INF
DriverVer=07/01/2001,5.1.2600.0

Generic.Mfg = "Compatible USB storage device"
GenericBulkOnly.DeviceDesc = "USB Mass Storage Device"

[FastRedPonyCar]

yeah I've checked and the usb service was disabled. I re-enabled that in the registry/group policy so now in vista, the drive actually shows up but I get access denied. I checked and it seems that 2 files for the USB files in the INF folder have permission denied to them. I changed the permissions and it still says access denied.

For the xp systems, the drives show up but it just doesn't have drivers. I updated all the drivers and it still says it cant find the drivers :(

[nekrosoft13]

are you some sort of IT admin? either someone did a good job disabling it, or your inf files/drivers are corrupt.

did you recently installed or removed some service pack? inf corruption happened to me twice once on XP long long time ago, and more recently on vista when I installed one of the leaked SP1 betas.

[FastRedPonyCar]

the higher ups have pushed down something via a GPO and me and a couple other admins are trying to figure out what they've done because right now, there's no exceptions policy in place to let people who actually depend on using these thumb drives to do our job actually USE them.

It happens all the time. Big brother pushes some sort of new policy and it's our job to figure out how to get around it. We've been successful just about all the time. This is the only one that's really got us stumped.

The INF files are fine, all the dll's needed are there but there's just something not giving us permission to access the drive that the computer sees and can show me anything I need to know about it in the vista disk maintenance window.

[technoid]

Don't know if this will help but here's two article links.

First Version
http://www.intelliadmin.com/blog/2006/04/disable-usb-drives.html

Improved Version
http://www.intelliadmin.com/blog/2007/01/disable-usb-flash-drives.html

[FastRedPonyCar]

yeah I've already read up on disabling the usbstore, changed it from 4 back to 3 and given all users on the machines I'm working on full rights to the files in the INF folder... in fact, I even gave full control of the INF AND the system 32 folder to all users.

Still doesn't work.


I'm impressed really becuase this is the first time that they've done something like this that I haven't found a way around it within 5 or 10 minutes.

[technoid]

yeah I've already read up on disabling the usbstore, changed it from 4 back to 3 and given all users on the machines I'm working on full rights to the files in the INF folder... in fact, I even gave full control of the INF AND the system 32 folder to all users.

Still doesn't work.

I'm impressed really becuase this is the first time that they've done something like this that I haven't found a way around it within 5 or 10 minutes.
Be sure to post the answer when you find it, like you said, this is an interesting problem.