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In my company, we have a policy to disable USB Storage by disabling the USBSTOR.SYS via GPO.

Strangely, some computers (not all) seem to be immune from this GPO, even though GP Modeling and GP Result indicates that the USBSTOR.SYS-disabling GPO is in effect.

Upon checking the installed software, we discovered that there are some 3rd party drivers installed, one of them a "USB 3.0 driver" or something like that. When we asked about it to the SI that built our system, they said that that driver is part of the system's drivers (we're using Lenovo desktops).

My questions:

  1. Is it possible that the 3rd party "USB 3.0" drivers be the cause of the GPO 'failure'?

  2. If yes, how do I disable this driver?

  3. If no, what else could be the cause?

Additional info:

  • The clients are all Windows XP

  • The DCs are all Windows 2008

  • The users that use the GPO-immune PCs all have no Admin rights

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1 Answer 1

up vote 0 down vote accepted

Did you test and validate this on a computer with the USB 3.0 driver?

I actually have a Lenovo notebook with USB 3.0, and the USB 3.0 driver name is not usbstor. There are nusb3xhc and nusb3hub. You may want to edit your ADM template, and add these names to determine if that works.

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Thanks for the comment! I'll test your suggestion first thing tomorrow morning. –  pepoluan Jul 30 '12 at 15:11

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