They guys who first upgraded the Zunes hard drive are now doing it for the public. You can now send your Zune to Ipodmods.com and they will upgrade it to a 80 gig or a 40 gig model. How ever, doing this will void your Microsoft Zune warranty. The Zune 80 gig model is going to set you back $489.98 in total, once you purchase a hard drive from Ipodmods.com they will install it for free and send it back to you right a way with your upgraded hard drive installed.
The outer shell of the Zune does not change and looks exactly the same, the only thing different is its now sporting a 80/40gig hard drive. If you decide to do this, you better hurry, they are expecting a rush of orders and sooner you get your orders in the faster you will get your upgraded Zune. Just remember it does void your warranty!Â
For more info on this, visit Ipodmods.com and get in contact with them.
There is a report out about a young Swedish boy who has hacked the DRM and Wifi Protection of the Zune. Just so the record is set straight, this is all false. The report came from UnconfirmedSources.com, which has at the bottom:
Unconfirmed Sources political satire and news story parodies as represented above are written as satire or parody. They are, of course, fictitious.
But any ways, here is the fake report:
| Unconfirmed sources report that a young Swedish hacker named Nutzipper has defeated the Digital Rights Management on Microsoft’s new mp3 player the Zune. Our source also indicates that the hacker has also compromised the Zune’s Wi-Fi music sharing system. The Wi-Fi hack apparently allows users to secretly transfer music from any nearby Zune. Microsoft is very concerned about the possible security breach and the RIAA is threatening to sue Microsoft over the faulty DRM standard. The young Swedish hacker apparently received a Zune from an American source, the Zune is not available in Europe yet, and quickly set to work. Nutzipper, who already has a reputation for stellar hacks, must have completed this hack in just one week of feverish work. The hack, called zukebox, is rumored to allow any user the ability to download files from any Zune within range without permission and without the users knowledge. With the addition of the DRM hack the files become playable and tradable indefinitely. Zukebox, if it exists, could spell the end of all digital DRM protected music on the Zune. |
If you are like many iPod users who converted to the Zune, you would have lost some songs purchased with iTunes thanks to the iTunes protection, as it will not allow you to move music over to the Zune. Fear not iPod convertees, there is help:
1. Create a new playlist in iTunes.
2. Add the protected songs to your playlist until you have 72 minutes of music.
3. Click Edit and select Preferences.
4. Select the Advanced tab.
5. Click the radio button next to Audio CD on the Burning tab.
6. Click the Burn Disc button.
7. Upon completion of burning the disc, rip the songs to MP3 using Windows Media Player.
8. Open the Zune software and sync the newly created MP3’s to your Zune device.
This is not 100% confirmed, but does look very promising. We knew this would happen, and knew would not take too long for it to happen, and now it has. A user from ZuneBoards.com has found away to keep songs sent to you by your buddies for more then 3 days or 3 plays. The first step to DRM freedom is to have the hard drive hack set up (Thanks to ZuneBoards.com again). Once that is done…
“It’s fairly simple. Once you implement the harddrive hack, all you need to do is browse out to the “Zune:\Music� Folder. Find the folder that contains your transfered songs. Copy them to your hard drive, delete them from the Zune, and copy them back to the Zune.�
If you get the “Access Denied� error, there’s a simple work-around.
“…load up the Zune software… run a quick sync.. open up explorer.. and do your thing… through this process, do not close your Zune software.�
Will have to keep eye on this and see if it actually works out, if any one gets this working and can confirm it, please let us know.
A good chance you would have already heard about the Zune hard drive hack and the Wifi one, but since we were offline, we did not have a chance to post about it, so now we are :)
So what the deal is with this hack is you are able to move documents to and from your Zune, it pretty much just becomes a 30 gig ( or 80gig) portable hard drive. Here is the tutorial on how to do it. Full props to guys at ZuneBoards.com for this hack as well.
- To make your Zune a Hard drive follow this tutorial
- To add files to your Zune follow this tutorial
This is a very primitive way of doing this and I really do not recommend you do this if you are not very computer literate. I am looking at having a program made to make this all much simpler for the users. So if any programmers out there, would love to hear from you, drop me a line at coops8D (at symbol) gmail.com
Yes there is a way to beef up your Zune to a 40 gig or even 60 or 80 gig, but sadly this is not an official thing and does lead to you voiding your warranty. The guys at iPodMods.com (strange for them to be messing with Zunes..) have manged to crank the Zunes hard drive capacity up a notch. However, if you goto 40gig then it will still all look normal, but on their 60 and 80gig mods they have yet to find a way to put the back cover back on. This really isn’t for the average person, you would have to be quite the tech savvy person to know what your doing and understand it all. Its also gives you another look inside the Zune.
Happy modding!
