Use your Windows Phone 7 device as a USB drive

Most of you who own a Windows Phone 7 device would’ve already realized that you cannot use the phone as a USB drive. Plugging the phone into your PC with the cable will not allow you to explore it with explorer for simple drag and drop operations. Apparently there is a way around it, using a simple registry hack. All you have to do is:

1)      Open the registry editor on your PC by typing regedit in your Start menu

2)      go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\USB; search forZuneDriver

Now you will modify three entries (note, if you have multiple WP7 phones, you have to do it for each one)

–          Change ShowInShell from 0 to 1

–          Change PortableDeviceNameSpaceExcludeFromShell from 1 to 0

–          Change EnableLegacySupport from 0 to 1

Once you’ve done that, the device, media folders should show up in explorer. If you need to modify anything, just close the Zune Desktop software. You can place files into the phone using explorer, but it won’t be readable by the phone, instead you can read the files on another computer with its registry modified as well, essentially turning your phone into a USB drive. Thanks to the folks at WPCentral for the tip.