ExpanDrive

For me, one the biggest disappointments about the original iPhone was the lack of a mountable file system. Not that the iPhone needed any more hype, but how sweet would it have been to tack on “portable drive” to its laundry list of features? Well, thanks to ExpanDrive, now you can.

All of a week after the release of the iPhone 3g, the iphone dev team released its pwnage tool, allowing you to jailbreak your phone. There’s a pretty exhaustive step-by-step of how to use the 3g pwnage tool here; the only thing I’d add to it is this bit about how to fix a DFU mode bug:

The error that everyone has been googling since the tool was released: “Failed to enter DFU mode”

The fix for this was difficult to find. There are hundreds of posts out there from people trying to find answers, but very few useful solutions. However, the solution is a simple one:

Fire up Terminal on your Mac and fire of these two commands:

cd ~/Library/iTunes
mkdir “Device Support”

If the Terminal is scary, you can do the same thing by going to your Home folder, opening “Library”, opening the iTunes folder inside Library, and then creating a new folder called “Device Support” in that iTunes folder.

Jailbreaking the phone does lots of fun things for you. But the ones that matter for this article are enabling root access and SSH support. After the jaibreak is complete and the phone has rebooted, open the Cydia app that has just been installed on your phone.  Scroll down to “OpenSSH Access How-To” and follow the the directions there.

After the last step, and while still in the terminal window, type “passwd root” and enter a different password, one hopefully hard to crack than the default, which is “alpine”.  This will prevent people from messing with your phone while you poach their wireless networks.

Once all that’s done, go over to Expandrive and enter whatever IP address you just typed into the Terminal, along with the username “root” and the new, secure root password I just told you to make. The drive should pop right up on your desktop. Open it, and it should look something like this:

You can drag and drop stuff onto and off of that as you would any other ExpanDrive-mounted disk. Unfortunately, it only works over the Wi-Fi connection, so it’s still not as fast as a disk-use iPod, and I still haven’t figured out how to add and delete media and apps this way.  I’d also be careful filling the drive to capacity, since it seems to have no idea how large it really is.

Windows users can find similar instructions here using our SftpDrive product.