USB Driver installation - Access is Denied.

[Sirrush]

After a few friends' USB Flash drives drivers not installing properly on my Vista laptop, I decided to check this problem out. Uninstalled the drivers of my own USB Flash drive, tried reinstalling them, but then I get an Access is denied on the Disk drive.

It installed drivers fine before, nothing significant changed as far as I can remember.

Any suggestions?

[CX23882-19]

Is the "accessed denied" error message from the driver installation, or is it when attempting to access/mount the drive?

Are the drives formatted as FAT32?

[Splash]

What they said. Also... is your laptop part of a corporate environment? Some domain admins block USB storage being installed using group policy for data security, and that could give a similar error.

[ToGGoT]

Hmmm, does seem odd.

Had this on an XP machine back in the day, when my brother has been "playing" with the registry. Ended up reloading it because no end of research wasnt getting anywhere.

[Sirrush]

Is the "accessed denied" error message from the driver installation, or is it when attempting to access/mount the drive?

Are the drives formatted as FAT32?

The error message shows up during driver installation. As for the USB Flash drive its filesystem, I assume its FAT32, my XP machine only shows "FAT", though, so I'm not entirely sure.

What they said. Also... is your laptop part of a corporate environment? Some domain admins block USB storage being installed using group policy for data security, and that could give a similar error.

No, this laptop is for personal use.

Hmmm, does seem odd.

Had this on an XP machine back in the day, when my brother has been "playing" with the registry. Ended up reloading it because no end of research wasnt getting anywhere.

I couldn't even find any information about that, getting the feeling its a registry thing, however Google hasn't been very helpful with that.

[Splash]

It could be a corrupted usbstor.sys if non-storage based USB devices work ok. You could try

sfc /scannow

which will replace the system files with known good copies (you will need your Windows cd/dvd and will probably have to update some drivers afterwards)

[Sirrush]

It could be a corrupted usbstor.sys if non-storage based USB devices work ok. You could try

sfc /scannow

which will replace the system files with known good copies (you will need your Windows cd/dvd and will probably have to update some drivers afterwards)

Tried reinstalling drivers on my USB headphones, same error (Access is Denied).

sfx /scannow aborts at 67%, giving me a "Windows Resource Protection could not perform the requested operation." message.

[Splash]

so... your Windows install isn't able to repair it's own files? I think you're resigned to a reinstall, or a perpetuity of niggling bugs that will never be completely fixed.

[Sirrush]

so... your Windows install isn't able to repair it's own files? I think you're resigned to a reinstall, or a perpetuity of niggling bugs that will never be completely fixed.

Lovely.

Well, thanks for the help anyways. Time to reinstall Vista I guess, that, or wait for Windows 7 RC. :/

[Splash]

Yeah, sorry to be the bearer of bad news but that's what I'd be looking to do. You could spend forever and a day trying to repair the problem, but the best advice I could give would be to backup, reinstall an restore data. Check the data for Bad Stuff while you're at it, it would suck to do all that and then have to do it again because of Bad Stuff.