How in the Tech

Eradicate non present storage device information

By Adam Myers ⋅ February 4, 2010 ⋅ Tags: Command Prompt, System Administration

Windows keeps track of every device that is connected to the system, even when the device hasn’t been seen in months. Every USB thumbdrive is uniquely identified and recorded in the bowels of Windows – the Windows registry. To the user, this is what allows Windows to always assign the same drive letter to an external storage system, for example. Typically, this indefinite tracking of devices rarely presents a problem but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a reason to keep it clean. It may come in handy if your trying to cover your tracks after corporate espionage.

As iterated above, all this information is stored in the Windows Registry, specifically in the keys:

• HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\DeviceClasses
• HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices
• HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\MountPoints2
• HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\MountPoints2\CPC\Volume

While you can get your fingers dirty and clean up everything manually, there is a free utility named Drive Cleanup that will nuke all non present Storage Volumes, Disk, CDROM, Floppy USB drives. Drive Cleanup is tiny at just 20KB and is executed from an admin-rights Command Prompt.

Drive Cleanup can be controlled by a number of command line parameters that determine which types of devices you wish to purge. If launched directly without any flags, it does it’s job fully so be warned of that. Adding the -t option will describe exactly what Drive Cleanup will perform without actually doing it.

Now don’t you have some cleanup to do?