Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Disabling Symantec endpoint protection, Fixing copying to external drives problem

lately Symantec endpoint protection was installed in our company, it worked fine for my colleagues, but for me I wasn’t able to copy anything to external devices
so I started looking on how to disable it
I have tried lots of solutions and all didn't work
I tried normal uninstall, it required admin credentials, and the IT admin was on vacation ;)
I have tried Clean Whip tool, it didn’t uninstall endoint
I have tried disabling the services, I remember the services names, EAFRCliManager, Removel Storage Mgmt Service, Removal storage service
all methods didn’t work
Finally I started looking into the registry trying to find anything related
I was looking for hidden start up services and I found 2 services, named GeFilter, Geprotection
I have tried to change the startup type for these services, I wasn’t able to. I wasn’t able to do any changes for these services, I have tried lots of tricks to have full control over this keys to change them, none has worked.
I have noticed there is a key inside of them that is named VolumeInformation{SomeGuid}, I started looking with this Guid, and appeared that this guid is for my C drive
I wasn’t able to rename any of the keys before, but after my changes to have full control, I was able to, so I have renamed this key, removing the Guid part. then I restarted my PC
After restart still I wasn’t able to change values inside these services keys, also unable to delete. since I was able to rename, I tried renaming the services name, I was able to. after renaming, I tried deleting, I was able to
Finally I deleted both services, I look for other locations for the 2 words, GeFilter, GeProtection, deleted them all
Then I restarted my PC one more time, and voila, I was able to copy to external hard drives
To have full control over registry keys you can find more details here
http://www.mydigitallife.info/grant-read-write-full-control-permissions-on-registry-keys-fix-cannot-import-and-access-denied-error-in-regedit/

1 comment:

  1. Update:
    All you need to do
    1- Start task manager, End task for EAFRCliManager if exists
    2- Open Local services, Disable the services EAFRCliManager, Removal Storage Mgmt Service, Removal storage service
    3- Open registry, search for geprotection, you will twice find 2 keys looks like LEGACY_GEPROTECTION, LEGACY_GEFILTER, edit permission, take ownership, and then give control to owner to delete, then delete
    You will twice find also 2 other keys named geprotection and gefilter, simply try to delete, if not deleted, rename then delete.
    4- Restart PC, you will be able to use your external drives normally

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