Acessing removeable storage drives

  • Thread starter Thread starter Ken & Faye Williams
  • Start date Start date
K

Ken & Faye Williams

Hi, Over past week I cannot access any removable storage drives from My
Computer. This includes A drive, CD drives & flash drives as well as camera
downloads. However, CD drives will work if opened via software or a disk is
left in the drive when booting up. But cannot access A drive or USB flash
drive etc. Other USB items work OK.

Have checked Device Manager etc & shows all devices working OK. Has anyone a
remedy for this problem. I sometimes get an error message Generic Host
Process for Win32 Services has encountered a problem.
 
Hi, Over past week I cannot access any removable storage drives from My
Computer. This includes A drive, CD drives & flash drives as well as camera
downloads. However, CD drives will work if opened via software or a disk is
left in the drive when booting up. But cannot access A drive or USB flash
drive etc. Other USB items work OK.

Have checked Device Manager etc & shows all devices working OK. Has anyone a
remedy for this problem. I sometimes get an error message Generic Host
Process for Win32 Services has encountered a problem.
Click to expand...

XP Home or Pro? If Pro, check in Local Security Policy editor and in Group
Policy editor to see if access to removable storage has been blocked.
 
Thanks Sharon,

I have XP Home - any other ideas?

Ken
Click to expand...

The interface for this kind of blocking is not present in XP Home. It can
be done by editing the registry or using third party security tools but you
would remember setting something like that up.

The only other explanations I can come up with are hardware related: either
faulty/damaged drivers for the controllers on the motherboard or damaged
hardware. Third party program involving removable storage (cd burning
programs, backup programs, monitoring software, etc) may be to blame but
would not look that way unless something like this was recently installed.

I suppose malware (adware, virus, etc) could be a possible cause as well
but these usually block you out of local resources that keep you from
removing the resident malware.

Since you can access CDs using specific steps, I'm leaning towards driver
or software directly related to removable storage rather than a physical
problem with the hardware.

Unfortunately problems of this type are harder to track down. Keep a close
eye on Event Log to see if there are any clues given. If you've tinkered
with services at all, enable anything you've disabled again. Especially
check the service for removable storage and that it is configured for
automatic starts.
 
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