Use your Windows Phone 7 device as a portable USB drive

Who needs a removable micro-sd card when you can just use your Windows Phone 7 device as a portable USB drive ? Here’s a little trick to enable USB drive mode on your Windows Phone 7 phone. I did some digging into the Windows registry looking for all the references to the Zune software and the devices USB stack  and finally found that the devices actually support this mode but that it is simply disabled by default. So here’s how to do it:

Open Windows Registry Editor by typing regedit in your start menu Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ Then go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\USB  (and not the other ControlSet01 or 02 if you have them) and then search for ZuneDriver

and you should see something like this:

I currently have 3 WP7 devices linked to my PC that’s why you see 3 folders under VID_045E&PID_04EC&MI_00. Choose the device you want (you should normally only have one anyway) and edit the following entries:

Change ShowInShell from 0 to 1 <- this enable Windows Explorer to show the device when pluged in Change PortableDeviceNameSpaceExcludeFromShell from 1 to 0 Change EnableLegacySupport from 0 to 1 <- this enables Windows Explorer to detect the device You can also change EnableDefaultAutoPlaySupport but it didn’t seem to do anything.

Once its done just plug-in your device to your PC. The Zune software will automatically launch as usual and your device will also appear in the Windows explorer as seen in the first screenshot above. Now just close the Zune software and you will finally have access to the device’s storage. You now have direct access to all your media content and can even copy/paste stuff in there without the need of the Zune software.

Update: Just finished looking at the media files on the device and here’s what I found:

- Setting your Photo syncing option to “as original” (so the pictures aren’t resized when copied to the phone), works as it should. This means that the photos on the phone are the exact same copy of the orginals on your PC. But what you see in the the device’s photo gallery is a thumbnailed/resized version of them, automatically created by the phone (or zune software during syncing process) to speed up loading and viewing on the phone. Also, if you decide to send a photo via mail it can only have a maximum resolution of 1630×1084 (this means that the phone is not sending a copy of the orignial file you synced but a resized version).

-Videos are either .WMV or .MP4 but they are all transcoded to WMV9 (syncing an .MP4 will result in a WMV9 contained in a .MP4 ). The bitrate will depend on the original file but maximum resolution is 800×600. I already talked about this process a couple of months ago.

http://www.mobiletechworld.com/2010/11/18/use-your-windows-phone-7-device-as-a-portable-usb-drive/