*** UPDATE: Since this post there have been two titles released that make it vastly easier to access your iPhone as a removable drive . They're reviewed in "iPhone Disk Mode - 2 Easy Ways"

Many many people have been waiting for the ability to treat the iPhone as a disk as you can with iPods, effectively adding a removable storage to the list of features for our iPhone. A coder called Core has found a method to emulate disk mode. It's not for the faint hearted but once refined could easily be made seamless. He has effectively created an AppleTalk Filing Protocol server on your iPhone which then, over SFTP, 'shares' the iPhone disk. Think network shares or network disks...

Many many people have been waiting for the ability to treat the iPhone as a disk as you can with iPods, effectively adding a removable storage to the list of features for our iPhone. A coder called Core has found a method to emulate disk mode. It's not for the faint hearted but once refined could easily be made seamless. He has effectively created an AppleTalk Filing Protocol server on your iPhone which then, over SFTP, 'shares' the iPhone disk. Think network shares or network disks...

It's quite new but should be available on installer.app by the time you read this. It's not for the faint hearted but once refined could easily be made seamless. He has effectively created an AppleTalk Filing Protocol server on your iPhone which then, over SFTP 'shares' the iPhone disk.

Here's what you do.

1. Use installer.app or get the files and follow Core's installation instructions on the same page
2. Make a note of your iPhone's IP address
3. Connect to afp://your_ip_address user id: root and password: alpine from your Mac
4. Voila, your iPhone is now a shared disk

Windows users can access the disc via a Samba share, which is unfortunately more complex because MS did a few weird things in WebFolders (which is what they decided to call it). Thankfully there's detailed instuctions available. 

Very very handy though frankly all this would be unnecessary if Apple would just add a USB removeable disk mode to the iPhone..

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written by ronpaul2008.com , November 29, 2007

This is cool, but I can use SFTP to do similar. I agree Apple should add USB Mass Storage mode...

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written by Patrick V. , September 01, 2008

you know why apple corp don't want to have iphone a usb mass storage device? cause of itunes! and possible hacking or putting unrecognized files in iphone!

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