No write access to external media.

Hello all.

Several years ago my work laptop stopped writing to DVD and SD cards, it wasn't a big deal as I didn't really use those for work (reading worked fine).

I have recently been given my old work laptop, which had a fresh Win7 Pro 64bit install, which I now use as my main machine at home, I upped the RAM to 8GB from 4GB and fitted a 2TB SSHD. All was good until I just noticed for some reason when I try to write to: DVD/SD/memory-stick/external-HDD I always get the message "The disk is write protected".

All the media works fine in other machines and I can read from them no problem.

The same result from both admin accounts on this machine.

The only software installed which was common between them is Irfanview, GOM player, possibly some codec packs, Teamviewer, firefox, itunes, icloud,

I have tried making a registry entry:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\StorageDevicePolicies
but no difference.

Can anyone help?!

Sounds like your company had set up a group policy blocking people from writing to external media or DVDs.

Here is helpful information from Microsoft about using Policy Editor:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/...(v=ws.11).aspx

In the past, I have used Policy Editor to solve similar issues.

Hi thanks for the reply.

I had a poke around in the policy editor, but to be honest don't know what to look for. The Win 7 install was fresh, so should be no policies in place. It worked fine for a few months!

Since your company installed it, there may have been some policies set somewhere in the install which are restricting the external devices. They may have a standard Windows 7 image that they push down to computers; if so, then it is likely that there are some policies included in it. This is something that some companies do, so as to control what can get onto or off of their network.

I don't have a Windows 7 computer available right now, but when I get home this evening, I'll poke around on my Windows 7 computer at home, to see if I can find anything that would be helpful here.

Okay, thanks for your time.

rvcjew said:

Look to see if you have any of these set. In User Config and Computer Config areas of the policy editor.

No they are all okay. However, I mentioned I created HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\StorageDevicePolicies - well, this was set to "1" not "0" - so I changed it and now have access to anything connected to USB. The built-in SD reader still won't write which may mean it is broken in some way.

I've not yet tried the CD/DVD writer, but I can live with how it is now. Even if I need to get an external CD/DVD.

I think I had 2 problems at the same time, the policy and the card reader fault.

Thanks for the suggestion.

Yes, drivers should be okay, I used the Thinkpad update tool. Just to make sure I followed the link and did that too. I'm pretty confident it is probably the drive, as it's now hard to extract the cards, they are fowling on something, probably the read-only detector.

Edit, yes used the tool!