USB drives have become the most popular and standard removable storage device to move data to different locations. They come with features like password protection and are compatible with all numerous operating systems and extra storage capacity (up to 65 GB).

The main issue with USB drives is the threat of viruses and other malware that are easily spread during the transfer of data from different computers. Today organizations have even the issues of their workers easily writing data onto USB drives using their PCs which may include confidential proprietary data. If you have windows XP with SP2, then you can disable the writing option to USB drives.

The following steps will enable you disable the USB writing option:

To edit the computer registry, first you should log onto your computer with administrative rights.

First click on Start button and type “Regedit” in Run option.

Here locate the location to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control

Here in right side panel, click right to create a key with the name “StorageDevicePolicies”.

Now in left side panel, select “StorageDevicePolicies” key, again right click to create new DWORD value then label it “WriteProtect”.

Set its value to “1″. But again enable this option set its values “0″.
You are done, now close the registry editor and restart your computer to effect the changes..