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tcianfloneFlag for United States of America

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Server 2008 R2 Reversing GPO Denying CD Write Access (Burn Rights)

I had a request from a client to deny certain Win7 computers the ability to write optical discs from their local CD/DVD burner/drives. I used the GPO at Computer Configuration > Policies > Administrative Templates > System > Removable Storage Access > CD and DVD: Deny write access. I linked the GPO to an OU in which I placed the appropriate computers. This worked great! However, I got another request to ALLOW one of those same computers to burn discs again. So I just moved the computer back into the same OU as the other computers that always had burn rights, did a gpupdate /force on both the server and the client, rebooted the client, but the burner software displays the message that the user has no burn rights still. I then created a GPO that explicitely ALLOWED burn rights, but still no joy. What will it take to get the burn rights reassigned to these computers? Thanks!
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Will Szymkowski
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Check to make sure that the GPO is being applied. Use rsop.msc from the command prompt. Right click Computer Configuration and then select properties. From there you will see what policies are in fact still being applied to this machine.

Also reference the event viewer as well to ensure there are no error messages trying to undo the restric access.

If the GPO is not being applied you can try and open gpedit.msc (local) and see if it is being applied there. If it is try changing it back and test again.


Will.
Depends how you set the policy, if you used preferences they do not undo, if you used more traditional settings they these should undo one the policy no longer applies.

You can run gpresult and output to a html file all the applied setting's which policy is winning etc, you could even try adding a filter to deny policy processing on the original policy for that computer or user.

Aside from that things can get a little buggy with policies, so maybe unpick what the policy "actually" does and reg hack it in reverse.
If the policy setting in the new GPO is "not configured" then it won't change the setting in the workstation's registry.  I suspect this may be what is going on.  You'd have to set the policy in the new GPO (at least temporarily) to allow this function and let it propagate so that that workstation's registry will be changed back to what is actually the default setting. IOW, for this specific policy, you have to set it to "Disabled" so that "Deny write access" is disabled, thereby enabling write access.
I would be focusing on whether group policy is being applied correctly (and from where).
Settings that are in Administrative Templates (at least most of them) should revert to their unconfigured state when the GPO no longer applies.  See this link for more detail:
http://gpoguy.com/whitepapers/understanding-policy-tattooing/
Are the permissions possibly set to the user also?  To me it sounds like the system is not accepting the policy as stated earlier.  Typically you would move the workstation out and if the gpo is set to "Not Configured" it will reset those rights to default for that user or any user for that matter on the workstation.  I don't think your GPO is applying.  Can you do a gpupdate /result and see if it is accepting the new policy and view the html report.
Ageed with hypercat I will also recommend to create new OU and apply the same policy which is applied but to disable the same and then move the computer in question to this OU.As if you apply the deny policy registry changes are made on worksation and same is not changed if the computer is move to new OU as the registry setting of deny is still tatooed.

Once the policy is applied you also need to reboot the client computer for setting to take effect as this is computer policy.
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Raj-GT
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Go to below location on client
HKCU\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\RemovableStorageDevices
you will find 4-5 GUID's and in right hand pane you will see deny_write key

Replace the value to deny_write with the value given in deny_read
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Shazzam! Brilliant! Logged in as administrator, removed the optical drive from device manager, rebooted, and it's burning again. Thanks!