Accessing the Zune HDD with an adapter

[zuneninja]

I would like to know what happens when you remove a Zune 30's hard drive and connect it to a PC using a ZIF to SATA adapter? How many partions are there? Can you access anything?

[Netrix]

There should be two... The system partition and the data partition. Of course there would also be a Windows folder in the ROM, but that is a bit different.

[zuneninja]

thanks for the reply. What can you tell me about the filesystems? Can you read or write to these partitions? And one question about ZIF drives, are the power supply lines combined in the flat cable or are they seperate like an IDE drive?

[roebeet]

tmk, you cannot access the partitions with a ZIF to USB (or SATA) adapter. The partition table is setup in such a way that it is unreadable outside of the Zune firmware. I have tried this myself, with no success.

To answer the power question - it is part of the ribbon cable, itself.

[zuneninja]

Would it still be possible to create a byte level image of the drive? So I could backup my drive, or if its time efficent compared to transcoding files, switch between different "playlists" (images of different disks full of different movies) by applying different disk images.

And what else can you tell me about how we are locked out? Is there a thread somewhere you could link me to?

[roebeet]

I don't think I've ever seen a question as yours, to be honest. But, it's something I had tested a few months ago, myself - I just hadn't really gone as far as what you are suggesting.

I have a Zune 30, and I pulled the drive awhile back and placed it into a ZIF USB enclosure and booted it up. I've done this for other drives, such as the iPod 5G and Toshiba Gigabeat. In those cases, I could actually view the partition tables and mount them in Linux (I didn't try Windows). But, for the Zune, the partition table is not accessable - I would get an error when trying to view it in gparted or fdisk. I'm not sure why this is, but I suspect it has to do with the proprietary firmware and how it writes to the partition table.

Given that tools like dd will make a bit-by-bit copy of the drive, it's certainly possible that what you are suggesting could work. But unfortunately I've never gone that far in my testing.

[Netrix]

Originally Posted by roebeet

tmk, you cannot access the partitions with a ZIF to USB (or SATA) adapter. The partition table is setup in such a way that it is unreadable outside of the Zune firmware. I have tried this myself, with no success.

To answer the power question - it is part of the ribbon cable, itself.

They must have added that restriction with an update. It has been done before by ZunePet: http://zunerama.com/forum/index.php?topic=1273.0