Alright, I finally got around to upgrading my Apple TV’s drive a few weeks ago. I followed the directions at Engadget but it didn’t work properly for me. I had to adjust the commands slightly. That slowed me down slightly as I tried several different things to salvage their process. Sometimes I tried ‘dd’ing the whole drive which is a rather slow process. The first drive I got from NewEgg was DOA too, so I had to RMA that and wait for the replacement drive to come in.
My new drive is the Western Digital WD3200BEVE 320GB 5400 RPM 2.5″ ATA-6 Internal Notebook Hard Drive, as copied directly from my NewEgg invoice. I had the 160GB AppleTV and was able to rip and store about 125 movies on it, including my MP3s and some podcasts. I’m still working on getting all of my movies ripped and put onto the new drive but I’m guesstimating that the thing will hold about 250 movies now.
Anyway, to crack open your Apple TV you’re going to need a T8 and T10 Torx head screwdrivers. The kit I had only had T10+ so I had to buy a whole new set. It cost me about $8 and the hard drive another $80. At that price you’re better off buying the 40GB Apple TV and upgrading yourself. If you don’t have a 2.5″ external drive enclosure, add another $10-20 to your price. This enclosure works great for me. You can probably find something cheaper but you might as well spend a few extra dollars on one that comes with free shipping.
You’ll need a Mac or a Hackintosh to follow all of these steps. Thanks to Engadget here are the (slightly modified) steps you have to run:
- Unplug everything from your Apple TV. Gently peel off the giant rubber pad from the bottom of your Apple TV. A putty knife might be helpful, though I didn’t use one.
- Using the T10 screwdriver tip, remove the 4 screws from the bottom. The two screws in the back are longer than the two in the front.
- Carefully pull the bottom plate off and detach the IDE from the main board. Unfortunately, you cannot remove the cable from the drive directly at this time.
- Using the T8 tip, remove the hard drive from the bottom cover of the Apple TV.
- Place the drive you just removed into the external drive enclosure.
- Run the command ‘diskutil list’ and look for the device with “OS” and “Media” partitions. On my machine this happened to be “/dev/disk2″
- Use the ‘dd’ command to do a bit by bit copy of the drive into an image file. For example:dd if=/dev/disk2 of=/Users/nerdheard/AppleTVBackup/AppleTV.img bs=1024k
The bs=1024k means its going to copy in 1024 Kb chunks. This will copy the ENTIRE drive. This means it will consume approximately 40 or 160GB of disk space, depending on your Apple TV model. Make sure you have plenty of room before doing this.
If you don’t have room, you can do a disk to disk copy but you’ll need a second enclosure. This is actually quite a bit faster. An example would be:
dd if=/dev/disk2 of=/dev/disk3 bs=1024k
If you do a disk to disk copy, you can skip steps 8 and 9 below.
- Make sure the disk is completely unmounted by executing the command ‘diskutil eject disk2′
- Remove the old drive and attach the new drive. Now you’ll want to copy the contents from your image file to your new drive. It’s likely to be /dev/disk2 also.dd if=/Users/nerdheard/AppleTVBackup/AppleTV.img count=1335 of=/dev/disk2/ bs=1024k
The count command here will limit the copy to the first 1335 blocks. This will make the copy a lot faster. You may run into problems with this little shortcut but it saves A LOT of time on the 160GB drive so its worth a shot.
- Make sure the new drive is completely unmounted with another ‘diskutil eject disk2′ command.
- Fix the partition table of the new drive with ‘gpt recover disk2′
- Eject the disk again: ‘diskutil eject disk2′
- Delete the Media partition: ‘gpt remove -i 4 disk2′
- Eject the disk again (getting sick of this yet?) ‘diskutil eject disk2′
- Look at the disk to find our free space: ‘gpt show disk2′
The free space starts at the block listed in the ’start’ column after the last partition on the disk. There should only be 3 partitions now, so it’ll be the number right after the last “GPT PART” in the far right column. - Eject the disk again: ‘diskul eject disk2′
- Add a new media partition using that block number as the start:gpt add -b 3141672 -i 4 -t hfs /dev/disk2
It’s important that whatever number you put after the -b coincide exactly with the start of the free space on your new drive. This varies by drive.
- At this point Engadget tells you to format the drive but DON’T! Every time I tried it completely hosed the GUIDs on drive and I had to start over from scratch.
- Check the /Volumes/Media and /Volumes/OSBoot partitions for .Spotlight folders. They most likely exist. Try: ‘ls -a /Volumes/OSBoot’ for the one and /Volumes/Media for the other. If you see the .Spotlight folder, then delete it using rm:sudo rm -rf /Volumes/Media/.Spotlight-V100
Use a similar command to delete the .Spotlight from the OSBoot partition.
- One last ‘diskutil eject disk2′
- Remove the drive from the external enclosure and attach the ribbon cable from the AppleTV. Using the T8 screwdriver, reattach the drive to the bottom cover of the Apple TV.
- Reattach the ribbon cable to the main board on the Apple TV. It should be keyed and can only be put on in one direction
- Using the T10 driver, reattach the bottom plate. Be sure the longer two screws are returned to the correct spot.
- Gently place the rubber foot back on. You may need some spray adhesive to get a permanent fix. I didn’t need to, mine stuck back on quite nicely. If you do use a spray adhesive, I highly recommend you verify the new drive is functioning before you permanently adhere the foot.
- Reattach the cables to the Apple TV.
- Perform a factory restore on the Apple TV from the Settings/Restore menu.
- Resync with your iTunes
I’m going to add some pictures later but my arm is in a sling and I can’t really dismantle my unit for the time being.