Copy data from and to a Microsoft Zune

I do not own a Zune and will probably never own one but I know a few people who do own one, this article is for them. The reason why I probably never own one? Because Microsoft is making the music player only available in select countries, and mine is not one of them.

You can enable a hard drive mode in the Zune which is similar to the hard drive mode on Apple's iPods. All you need to do is change some registry keys in windows to enable the feature.

The benefit of enabling the hard drive mode is that the Zune will then be recognized like any other removable storage devices on the system making it a lot easier to copy data to and off of the media device. For that, you can use Windows Explorer or any other file manager installed on the system.

You need to perform the following operations to prepare your system for it:

1. Press Windows + R, type regedit and hit the enter key afterwards.
2. Go to the following Registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\ControlSet001\Enum\USB\.
3. Search for PortableDeviceNameSpace and change the following registry keys to enable hard drive mode.
4. EnableLegacySupport to 1.
5. PortableDeviceNameSpaceExcludeFromShell to 0.
6. ShowInShell to 1.

Plug in your Zune and make sure the Zune software starts. The Zune should now appear in My Computer as a drive letter. You can now transfer files from and to the Zune using Windows Explorer or any other file manager that you are working with.

That's excellent if you want to create backups of all data on the Zune for instance, or if you want to copy all the songs found on the Zune to a hard drive to have them available on the computer as well. You can for instance create a full backup of the Zune's hard drive whenever you connect it to your PC so that you can restore it at a later time.

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