Wouldn’t it be great to use your Windows Phone 7 as a portable USB drive, rather then carrying a USB flash drive along with you? Yes, I know the same question has already been aroused in mind of many WP7 owners, but there is no way you can achieve this until now. Most of the WP7 handsets has several gigabytes worth of storage capacity but there is no way you can access them directly from your PC.
M. Daou has been digging into the Windows registry file to find out the solution. Luckily, he found out a nifty trick to use Windows Phone 7 (WP7) as a portable USB drive. This simple to follow registry tweak will let you use your WP7 device as USB drive or memory card. No need to carry a separate flash drive when you already have your WP7 handset with you. Follow the below steps carefully.
Note: Remember to back up your registry before making any changes to it.
Use WP7 as Portable USB Flash Drive
You need to have Windows Phone 7 device and Zune installed to your PC. You should also connect your WP7 device to Zune once before using this registry tweak. Make sure your Windows Phone is not plugged in when you apply this steps.
Step 1: Open Windows Registry Editor
- Go to Start->Run and type regedit
Step 2: Navigate to following location
- HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetEnumUSB then press Ctrl+F to search ZuneDriver
You should see something like below (click on the screenshot for larger preview)
Step 3: Look for VID_045E&PID_04EC&MI_00 folder. You might find multiple subfolders under this folder in case if you’ve multiple WP7 devices connected to Zune. There is no direct way to tell which device belongs to which subfolder entry. In most of the case you’ll be using only one device.
Edit the following entries shown in right pane of Registry Editor Window
- ShowInShell: 0 to 1 <- it will display device content in Windows Explorer
- PortableDeviceNameSpaceExcludeFromShell: 1 to 0
- EnableLegacySupport: 0 to 1 <- this will enable Windows Explorer to detect connected device
That’s it. Next time whenever you plug-in your Windows Phone 7 to your PC, it will show it in a Windows Explorer (Zune software will also display the connected device as usual).
You should understand that this registry tweak only allows you to access Zune storage part of Windows Phone 7. There are few restrictions using the above registry hack. Although you can use your WP7 device as a portable USB drive, you will not be able to make documents work on your Windows Phone. There is no access to Office storage folder so copy pasting word, pdf or other office documents to folders like video will not help much.
Let us know whether this tweak worked for you or not?
Src: mobiletechworld
