Need help - can't use removable storage

I booted up my Aspire 5610 (Sadly with Vista Home Premium pre-installed) yesterday to find that suddenly, I can't use my removable storage devices. My DVD-ROM icon has a pretty red circle with a slash through it, and my USB stick gives me an "access denied" error if I try to access it. Looking in the security tabs, the "owners" of these devices are unknown, and I can't change their ownership to my admin account. (Assuming that's part of the problem.)

No, I sadly don't have a restore point to go back to.

I've emailed Acer tech support, but as the only solution they had to my last problem (the empowering launcher no longer works after a vista update) was wiping my hard drive and restoring the notebook back to factory settings, I don't have much hope for them

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

Try uninstalling the dvdrom drive from device manager, if you are not able to do it try booting into windows safe mode.

 

Did you installl any software or change seting in maybe esecurity? lock out drive?

that does.nt seem like acer issues i wound say some software you load or some vista policy you changed lock out remobable media

 

Acer Empowering Technology has a feature call Acer Elock management where you can lock Removeable and optical drives where your data can't be stolen when you are away from your computer. I think you might have this feature locked but it usually requires a password to access this feature. You might lok at this feature to see if that might be your problem.
Anyway this sound like you have the features locked thru Acer or Windows.

Walter