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I'm trying to transfer photos from a Samsung Galaxy S7 onto my Windows 10 PC, but when I plug in the phone via USB, it shows up as a device instead of a hard drive, and I can't use something like RoboCopy because there's no drive letter or path that I can use. I can navigate to the folders by going to "This PC" and selecting from there, but the copy keeps getting interrupted and some images aren't copied over fully, so som3thing like RoboCopy would serve me much better.

When I plug in the device, it shows up as SAMSUNG-SM-G930A. Is there a way that I can map the device as a drive like I would with say a network path or something like that?

Robert
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Tom D
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    Android phones are connected via MTP protocol. Such devices never get a drive letter and can never be used by robocopy. You can only use it in Windows Explorer. If you want to use command-line you have to enable Developement options and ADB on device, and use `adb pull`/`adb push` on your PC. Additionally you can use [adbsync](https://github.com/google/adb-sync) on top of adb. – Robert Aug 19 '20 at 12:01
  • that kinda sucks. I'll look into it though, thanks – Tom D Aug 19 '20 at 12:01
  • @Robert is correct with the exception that what "Android Phones" do is mostly up to the vendor, not google. Almost all of them *used to* support MSC protocol which would alllow this to happen but there were too many problems with this protocol and most (if not all) vendors quit supporting it. – Señor CMasMas Aug 19 '20 at 16:15
  • @SeñorCMasMas Mass Storage Protocol is no longer used on modern phones, because Windows/Linux, ... requires exclusive access to the whole partition. Therefore it has to be a separate partition which would require to partition the user space in the Android phone (hence the one or the internal user data partition would be smaller than expected by the user). This would be a very huge disadvantage just for being able to access the storage from a PC. And you would have to stop all apps that access the storage while the PC is connected. – Robert Aug 19 '20 at 16:26
  • @Robert. TOTALLY AGREED! I was just saying that this choice wasn't dictated by google and could 'still be done'. I guess my point was ... well ... pointless? :^P – Señor CMasMas Aug 19 '20 at 16:29
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    Does this answer your question? [How do I access MTP devices on the command line in Windows?](https://superuser.com/questions/369959/how-do-i-access-mtp-devices-on-the-command-line-in-windows) – Robert Aug 19 '20 at 16:49

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