Home How To & Tutorials Hack to install Windows 10 preview on unsupported phones. Risk is yours....

Hack to install Windows 10 preview on unsupported phones. Risk is yours. Windows 10 on a Lumia 1520 video.

February 16, 2015

People Hub First things first, it is quite risky and can brick your device easily. So the risk is yours and none may be able to help you out if it goes wrong. So, tread with caution and avoid doing it on your main phone!!

Now, there has been a hack available for installing Windows 10 for Phone preview on unsupported phones and we knew about it, since the time it was just out because many of you tipped us.

I resisted posting it initially, as it is usually better to see the success rate before making it popular. Surprisingly some of known faces have been able to use this hack for installing the Preview on devices like Lumia 520 and even Lumia 1520. Still, it is your own risk, as not only it can brick your device, you may face issues like no data, crashes and many more. See the Windows 10 running on a Lumia 1520 in the below video.

Windows 10 for Phones preview installation hack:

1. For the Lumia 1520 (and other phones?) reset your phone using the [url=”http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/mobile/support/faq/?action=singleTopic&topic=FA142987″]Windows Phone recovery tool. I recommend not logging in and setting everything up yet and just waiting til the end and doing a reset and letting it restore after you’re on Windows 10. This may not be required for your device but most likely is due to the space issue cited by Microsoft. You can see your available space in the About menu of the Windows Insiders app. Before resetting mine was ~200mb and after it was ~600mb. You can try without resetting but may get an error after it tries to download and install the update.
2. Install the Windows Insider app on your phone (you will need to have a store account configured)
3. Open the insiders app and go to the about options in the app bar and screenshot/make notes/email the settings to yourself. You may need this later.
4. Download and extract the WPInsidersHacks app (attached to this post) to your computer
5. Start the WPInsiderHacks app on pc, approve any firewall requests
6. Connect to the same WiFi that your PC is on. Edit the settings for the WiFi connection to turn on the Proxy and set it to use the PC’s IP address and enter 8877 for the port
7. Open Internet Explorer on your phone and navigate to http://[pc.ip.add.ress]:8877 where [pc.ip.add.ress] is the IP address of the PC running the WPInsidersHacks app
8. Tap on the link at the bottom to the fiddler root certificate
9. When prompted click open and then install to trust the cert and ok at the confirmation
10. Run the Windows Insider app and tap get preview builds
11. Tap on which custom action you’d like to perform. In my case I hit “Set to ATT Lumia 635” and click the arrow at the bottom
12. Accept the agreement and click the check mark at the bottom. the app will close
13. Now clear your proxy settings and run the insider app again
14. Tap get preview builds and login with your Microsoft account
15. Select the fast branch (if you’re reading this of course you want the fast branch) and click the arrow at the bottom
16. Go into the phone settings and check for updates. With any luck you should have Windows 10 there for you to install. On my AT&T 1520 it had to do 8.1 first but it kept going to 10 after 8.1 installed (had to check for updates again)
17. You’ll probably want to go into the settings and do another reset and then log into the phone and let it restore your previous data
The Windows Insider options are populated from the WPFlights.xml file. Feel free to edit/add stuff. I’ve experimented with writing to other keys but had mixed results. I wasn’t able to write to the Software\Microsoft\Settings\{1DEF9B7D-2322-40eb-A007-16A75D5CDA6F} for example (seemed to not like the curly braces?). It should have all the same permissons as the preview for developers app. You’ll just need to run the WPInsiderHacks app on your PC and point your phone’s proxy settings to it if you want to go back and set something again (such as enabling tethering).