[Inventor]

Hi, I recently bought a fairly high spec refurbished computer from a school clearance sale and I am now wanting to use it to be the basis of a simple media center. The problem I am facing Is that it wont recognize my mass storage devices (memory sticks and an external HD) through the USB ports. It Knows they are there because it will show me the names but it wont install them automatically and brings up the 'Install New Hardware Wizard' I've tried using this but it will reach the end of the installation and then say Invalid data. I have checked with the drivers on my laptop and there are the same ones on the new PC.
I am aware that some schools deliberately block USB storage devices for a variety of reasons so I googled my problem. It came back telling me that to disable/Enable USB ms devices there is a simple registry tweak, to change the DWord "start" value to 4-disable or 3-enable which is located at:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\USBSTOR,
However, when I checked in RegEdit there was no USBSTOR directory at all. I have many questions,
Does this directory exist as a default or is it something that is added for this tweak?
Is there another way of disabling the USB for hardware other than mouse and keyboard? If so how can it be reversed?
Thankyou

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If the school blocked USB ports, it would have been done so via a GPO. Is this machine attached to a domain? I would recommend doing a clean install of XP. You never know what some kid may have put on there and they didn't know about it.

[diabillic]

If the school blocked USB ports, it would have been done so via a GPO. Is this machine attached to a domain? I would recommend doing a clean install of XP. You never know what some kid may have put on there and they didn't know about it.

[Inventor]

It was a 4-10 years old school so I don't think that any kids will have done anything to the PC. And It was given a clean install of XP before I got it.

[edge2022]

Let's try seeing if the usb storage device can be read from and written to using another OS. This will help us isolate the problem.
Click on "Backup Files Without Windows" in my sig, and follow the steps there to create a Ubuntu Live CD. Then boot from it using the steps in that article. Once you boot into Ubuntu, check if you can read and write to your external usb storage.