Using a Zune as a Portable Storage Device

I wanted to use some of the free space on my Zune as an external hard drive.  There are a couple of articles that discuss how to set your registry entries to mount your Zune on the desktop.  The Zune in my case would not let me drag files to it and is reporting permission errors.  One of the articles I read mentions that by starting a large sync process and then killing the process you  can fool the Zune and leave it in an unlocked condition.  I'm not to fond of killing a process that has anything to do with writing files, so I started to think a little outside the box.

Steganography to the rescue, or in my case, a variation of it.  Steganography is a method where a file is secretly embeded into an image or other type of "Vault" file, usually encrypted and distributed throughout the content so as to be undetectable through casual observation.  The trick is to store the data in the Zune in a format it understands, namely, one of supported media types.  Since I wasn't concerned with encryption, I decided to zip up the  file content and append it to the end of a jpg file using an old school hacker technique.  There's a nice little write up on how to do this on lifeHacker.  Essentially you zip up your content and then append it to the end of your jpg file using the command line.

c:\\copy /B myPic.jpg+myZip.zip myVault.jpg

Initially I tried Winzip, but that had problems with the final result. 7-zip had no such problems.  Just drag and drop the combination jpg/zip file over to the sync window in the Zune app and sync.  I was able to use files just over 2 gig without any problems.  I did try an 11 gig file, which caused an error.