(FIX) Needs permission to make changes. External Drives, USB Flash Drives

Issue:

Attempting to plug in a USB flash drive / External hard-drive into a Dell computer (this one was a Dell Latitude E6440) will show up in My Computer, but you cannot write to the drive. Error shows "Needs permission to make changes" even if you are a local admin user. Connecting the device to another computer will allow it to write properly.

CAUSE: If you have Dell Data Protection software installed, this will cause this error to show up.

SOLUTION: Removing Dell Data Protection, along with the other pre-requisit programs will solve this issue.

Other Solutions that did not work:

• Updating the USB 3.0 drivers
• Editing registry values for storagedevicepolices:

1. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\StorageDevicePolicies
2. Highlight StorageDevicePolicies, and then create a New DWORD (32-bit) Value named as WriteProtect.
3. Double click the key WriteProtect in the right window and set the value to 0 in the Value
4. Data Box and press OK button
5. Restart your computer and try copying files into your USB drives.

Formatting the flash-drive to exFat or using 3rd party USB flashing tools

USB Flash Driver Format Tool (Ufix-II) from PNY

Checked ESET Anti-Virus to see if Device Control was enabled.

If you have any 3rd party software that has anything to do with encryption, data, or hardware scanning, see if removing or tweaking it will solve this issue. In this case, it was a Dell-branded software called Dell Data Protection.

Removing Dell Data Protection showed the USB port was disabled and reenabled during the process, making it evident that the USB ports were indeed affected by the removal.