How to Enable ‘Mass Storage” on Your Lumia 800

WARNING from llaadd: Before you even consider doing this, please note it is not recommended as WP7 was specifically designed not to work in mass storage mode because of issues when used in this way. Known issues include: media not showing on your phone properly and reduced responsiveness. Nokia and Microsoft are well aware of Mass Storage mode and they would have enabled it, if they felt it were viable for this OS.

Mass storage mode as most of you Symbian users know is when you connect your phone to your PC and use it similarly to an external hard-drive, which enables you to drag and drop files without the need for a third party software (such as Nokia Suite, Zune, iTunes etc…). Now apparently this isn’t a regular option on the Lumia 800 (possibly all WP devices- seeing as I haven’t tried any so I don’t know exactly).

The kind folks over at ‘NokiaBuff.com’ have figured out a workaround that enables you to drag and drop music, videos and other files to your Lumia 800 without the need to use Zune, now the main advantage of this is that it’s MUCH faster than transferring files through the program itself. Below are the steps with screen-shots (courtesy of LoveMyNokia.com).

*Note: according to the source this will work for Music & Video but any music files transferred are grouped under “Unkown Album” (perhaps a problem with the metadata transfer?)

Note 2: I haven’t actually tried this considering the lack of a 800 but according to the source and tipster it should work so good luck.

 Here are the steps to get it done in your Lumia 800.

Step 1 :

Open Registry Editor by typing “ regedit ” in start bar or in Run tool.

Step 2:

In the Left Pane click HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE and find a folder tree called SYSTEM -> CurrentControlSet -> Enum and then USB.

Step 3:

Press Ctrl + F or click Find in Edit Menu at the Menu Bar and search for “ZuneDriver” make sure USB folder is selected before searching.

Step 4:

It will find Zune Driver inside a folder tree called as VID_045E&PID_04EC&MI_00 . Just ignore all the stuffs and click Device Parametres folder tree.

P.S : Before we proceed rightclick Device Parameters and click Export in case if something goes wrong this will restore the registry to old state  .

Step 5 :

When you click Device Parameters in the right pane it will display the registry values under it.

Step 6:

Registry editing begins now

In the right pane double-click the registry value called

• ShowInShell and change its value from 0 to 1 .
• PortableDeviceNameSpaceExcludeFromShell and change its value from 1 to 0 .
• EnableLegacySupport from 0 to 1 .

Make sure these three values are changed. Just close the registry editor and it will save those values.

Step 7:

Remove the Lumia 800 and re-insert it again. You will see two portable devices in My Computer with a Storage capacity of  13.3GB. Now you can transfer your songs, pictures and videos to the Lumia without using Zune.

This trick consists of some drawbacks such as music added via this hack will show as unknown album in Music app.

But in our test the picture and video transfers to the device worked without any problem. Just make sure you copy the compatible formats to play in Lumia 800. This hack is faster that Zune as you can see the files pop up in gallery or video player as you begin to transfer.

Dont forget to eject device before removing the usb cable  .

Category: Applications, How to:, Nokia, Windows Phone