On the current NPR shader I'm working on, the line detection algorithm I developed is a post process using the normals and depths of each pixel. Currently I've been storing the depth in the alpha value of the rendered image, but I want to begin storing it in it's own texture using the complete range of the texture (all 32 bits). How would I go about using the rgba values to store one scalar value that I calculated? col = depthVal would simply assing r,g,b and a the value of depthVal independently. Thanks ahead of time for the help.

Why don't you just use a 1-component (32-bit) floating point texture?

I actually already started to do so and it works fine. Thanks for the reply anyway. AndyTX.rating++

If you still want to try with packing the depth into an RGBA buffer, you can look here for some GLSL code to do so. It should be simple enough to convert to HLSL.