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Solved: removable mass storage devices no longer able to be read

2K views 9 replies 2 participants last post by  marioh99 
#1 ·
greetings, first post !

i have a laptop where no removable mass storage devices work properly (they cannot be read).
the cd/dvd drive no longer can read either CD's or DVD's.
USB can no longer read thumb drives. OS is WinXP SP3.

the cd's and dvd's tested just fine in another computer, and so did the USB thumb drive.
the cd/dvd player has a drive letter, and XP correctly assigns a drive letter to the thumb drive (but prompts to format it instead of reading the data on it). when a CD is put into the cd/dvd player, no files are seen through windows explorer of the drive (0 items according to status bar).
there are no policies in the registry that would indicate a disabling of read access to removable mass storage devices. mouse and keyboard are plugged in via USB and work fine. can boot to USB, so USB reading of mass storage device only dysfunctional within windows.
scanned for malware, nothing. tried MS Fixit, nothing. can't restore due to policy disabling system restore (not my idea). reinstalled chipset drivers, nothing. removed cd/dvd from device mangler along with everything USB related, followed by reinstall of chipset drivers, nothing.

any ideas or i'm SOL and need to reimage?

thanks in advance.

edit: last thing i tried was running checkdisk, but doubt that'll fix the problem. i guess i'll find out on monday, but i'm not hopeful.
 
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#3 ·
Seems like you covered all the basics.. OS corrupted some how! It would seems like you will need to re-image the LT.
i'm trying to avoid that, but almost at that point.
the fact that it's affecting removable mass storage (admittedly i haven't tried a USB hard drive yet, just flash drives) makes me think there's some service or DLL in charge of reading or accessing this type of media that is somehow corrupted. and in theory, it should be fixable. :)

hoping someone can come along and just either provide the answer, or lead me to the solution with a solid suggestion.
 
#6 ·
Hmmmm.... Dude I hate to say it! But, I think the resolution will be re-imaging that HDD. I haven't found a reliable solution online besides the services that might be disable under Device manager. I'm curious to what the fix is if you decide not to re-image, post your resolution to your thread once its resolved.

Gotta love technology!
 
#7 ·
Hmmmm.... Dude I hate to say it! But, I think the resolution will be re-imaging that HDD. I haven't found a reliable solution online besides the services that might be disable under Device manager. I'm curious to what the fix is if you decide not to re-image, post your resolution to your thread once its resolved.

Gotta love technology!
i got a few ideas floating in my head to try later this week. my last ditch effort will be doing a repair on XP, then it's reimage time if that doesn't work.
i'll post the final resolution around thurs-fri.
 
#8 ·
I found the solution.

for CD issue : CDFS and UDFS were disabled.
the area in the registry for CDFS (UDFS and fastfat are also in the same Services area)

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Cdfs]
"DependOnGroup"=hex(7):53,00,43,00,53,00,49,00,20,00,43,00,44,00,52,00,4f,00,\
4d,00,20,00,43,00,6c,00,61,00,73,00,73,00,00,00,00,00
"ErrorControl"=dword:00000001
"Group"="File system"
"Start"=dword:00000004
"Type"=dword:00000002

start should be 1, or if not that, definitely not 4 which disables the service completely.

for USB issue:fastfat was disabled.
again, the start key was set to 4, changing it to 1 resolved the issue.

I suspect the PC was infected by malware in the past which disabled both CD/DVD and thumbdrive access, was cleaned, but the program used to clean it never fixed those 2 issues.
 
#10 ·
Marioh

Congrats on finding the solution.. how did you come to discover that the registry was edited?
thanks.
i found a thread on another forum that pointed to UDFS and CDFS being disabled in XP causing issues with reading from CD/DVD's.
from there, i figured out fastfat as that was disabled on the problematic PC but enabled on a functional PC.
 
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