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My 750 gig Apple TV

StealthRT said:
I guess you did not read my post above when i said that the ones i got off eBay worked just fine at half the price.
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Thanks for pointing that out - I had already ordered the parts however. Stupid Royal Mail strike in the UK is likely to mess up my order though.

The Syba SATA bridge is still available. I emailed them asking what the craic was, and they replied saying they have more coming in in 1-3 weeks and they do ship to the UK.

Guess it might take a while to get all the parts, but I'd rather have the exact same parts as suggested in this thread just for the sake that they have already troubleshooted those parts to death. Looking at 1TB hard drives and enclosures now.

Here, what's the story with powering the hard drive up first then the Apple TV? I have my TV, Apple TV etc all plugged into an extension lead and I power that off at the wall whenever the stuff isn't being used. So when I power that back on, I'll have to unplug the Apple TV then plug it back in again so the hard drive turns on first?
 
The IDE cable and IDE adapter arrived today. Just waiting on the SATA controller coming back in stock.

Just wondering - you guys are using eSATA to connect to your hard drives - does the Syba SATA adapter have an eSATA connection on it or is this an additional adapter?
 
Kilamite said:
The IDE cable and IDE adapter arrived today. Just waiting on the SATA controller coming back in stock.

Just wondering - you guys are using eSATA to connect to your hard drives - does the Syba SATA adapter have an eSATA connection on it or is this an additional adapter?
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The syba and all other bridges afaik have a Sata end. You're external hdd will have an eSata socket. I just used a sata to esata cable. Just one piece. Quite common and can be had anywhere pretty much. fwiw, the eSata cable is just shielded better as it is intended for external use.

From the tutorial in the HandBrake Tiki Bar forum:

There is really no big deal to these cables except for two different style ends and eSATA cables are shielded better than SATA cables as they are intended for external use. Anyhow these are in plentiful supply. Here is an example of such a cable http://www.satagear.com/eSATA-100_SATA_Cable.html though its not the one I used.
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Ah I see.

Hoping the Syba SATA controller is in stock soon - the hard drive and enclosure are on their way here. Just one missing piece before I can start having fun.

Dynaflash - if I use your ATVCloner, is it a pretty simple click start and let it do the work? There's nothing else to do/anything that could go wrong? Any reason to do the manual Terminal commands instead?
 
Kilamite said:
Dynaflash - if I use your ATVCloner, is it a pretty simple click start and let it do the work?
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Depends on you're definition of the word simple. I think its quite a bit easier than the terminal commands, which is why I wrote it. But I will let others that have done it both ways answer that if they want.
Kilamite said:
There's nothing else to do/anything that could go wrong? Any reason to do the manual Terminal commands instead?
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Sure, the power could go out or something. Something can always go wrong.
Have you read the guarantee on the website ? ;)

Seriously, you really have nothing to lose by trying it (conversely I have nothing to gain either). I mean if it hoses up the formatting for some unknown reason you can just reformat the disk with another method. You really aren't out anything.
 
ATVCloner

Kilamite,

Dynaflash's ATVCloner is the best thing since sliced bread. I have used it on a number of occasions, just recently to prepare a 2TB drive for my ATV. Give it a shot if you haven't already.
 
Well, I think my Apple TV is on its last leg. It started having sparkles and sprites across the screen a couple of weeks ago. I thought it might have been part of the eSATA hack, but I reassembled it to its factory condition (40 gb drive) and the problem persists. I hope Apple comes up with a revision before it dies...
 
Upgrade option with a Windows Machine???

Has anyone ever found a means to do the upgrade with a Windows Machine?

I do not have access to a Mac or Linux computer. :(

Any thoughts or suggestions?
 
So glad to have found this thread. I've read through the whole thing and have to say I'm impressed with the work. I currently run with a 250GB PATA internal on my TV but would love to run a SATA drive.

I'm wondering about giving up the wireless adapter and seeing if there's a mini-PCIe to SATA adapter out there. I've heard of people putting the HD decoder in there to give it 1080p capabilities, but it seems only a few hack could play it.
 
SATA to PATA conversion?

OK, I had a new crazy idea. I was thinking about the lack of PATA drives larger than 320 gb and while looking at the WD 320 gb PATA images on the web, I noticed that its controller board look just about the same as the board on my WD 750 gb SATA drive. So, I bought one and removed the controller boards. Sure enough, almost everything is the same - except for a couple of things, most notably the chassis. As you can see from the yellow boxes below, there's one chip on the boards that are in a different orientation. That appears to be necessary for accommodating the chassis, where on the 750 gb SATA drive there's an angled part of the chassis and on the 320 gb PATA drive it is horizontal. This prevents the PATA controller board from seating properly on the 750 gb drive, thus I cannot put the screws back in to fit the interconnect between the drive and the controller board. Bummer.

Any ideas? Is it possible to swap the drive chassis to put the 750 gb platters in the 320 gb drive controller? Anyone have a dead 2.5" drive who can take it apart to see if it's doable? If this controller can be made to fit the 750 gb drive, then we should be able to get even the 1 TB drive to fit in the Apple TV with a PATA interface.
 

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I would just try and file down that divider that's sticking up which would allow you to fit the controller board on. It's a bit risky though I guess!
 
Caveman, do you think this is how the chaps on eBay are performing the 1TB mod???

I'm in the market for an 'old' Apple TV, so I'm very tempted to buy one from them just to see how they're doing it...
 
Cave Man said:
It would be tough to know without taking it apart. I think it's worth an email to them considering it has to be a modification of the OEM.
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I too would like to know how they are doing theirs. Very tempted in purchasing the 750 gig upgrade for about $190. I would like to have everything i have right on the apple tv and not have to have my laptop on all the time. 320 gigs the normal way wouldn't give me all the room i would really like.
 
While I could be wrong here, I don't think what you're proposing to do by swapping driver boards will work. While the driver board may look and be exactly the same component wise the firmware loaded on to them will be different depending on the capacity of the disk. The firmware contains the geometry information for the disk including the number of platters, how many track are on the platters and so on. This information is needed so that when data is read/written to and from the disk the disk knows where to position the read heads and which platters to access.
 
Like I said I could be wrong, but I would be very suprised if it did work. If you're brave enough to try it then I'd love to know if it works:D
 
roidy said:
While the driver board may look and be exactly the same component wise the firmware loaded on to them will be different depending on the capacity of the disk. The firmware contains the geometry information for the disk including the
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I have previously swapped controller boards between same-model disks of different capacities without issues, so this may not be the case.
 
please please please....somebody try this.....It would be great to know if this is how they are doing it.

I emailed the eBay company, they just told me to buy the upgrade and they'll sort it all for me. Understandable, as they obviously know something everybody else doesn't!!
 
Well, I put in a 3 TB drive into my external enclosure to see if it would work my old Apple TV (that's experiencing overheating problems), but it doesn't. The enclosure's controller only sees 700 gb of the hard drive. I've emailed the company and they said its limit is 2 TB and there's no way to update it by firmware. Does anyone know of external enclosures that support 3 TB drives?
 
SATA board in AppleTV

I've gotten a miniPCIe SATA adapter working in my appleTV. The adapter is a BPlus PM362 (as shown here:http://www.mfactors.com/pm362-sata-to-mini-pcie-adapter/)

I have the AppleTV (original silver) talking to the SATA adapter, after copying the 10.4.8 (must be this version) IOPCIFamily.kext, IOAHCIFamily.kext and AppleAHCIPort.kext extensions into /system/library/extensions, and I've sorted out having those extensions loaded automatically at boot time from /etc/rc.local. (I should note that my AppleTV has FireCore's package installed.)

I finally got the new drive to mount reliably on /mnt/Scratch/Volumes (I didn't chose the mountpoint), and the first thing my AppleTV did was reach out over my home network to my desktop mac and begin syncing itself and pretending in all ways that it's a brand new first generation appletv. And sure enough, the media was getting dumped into the test drive.

My questions are:
1. Is this normal behavior? Has anyone else encountered this having more than one drive mounted to the ATV?

2. Is this behavior reliable? It's pretty much what I had in mind, because the hacking I have planned for the ATV include a bigger case, ATX power supply, and 3-4 TB drive hung on the SATA bus.If I can depend on the ATV to do this and not fall off the rails arbitrarily, I'm a lot further ahead in my hack than I thought.

3. What happens if there are /two/ extra drives? (My SATA bus has two ports).

4. Has anyone ever gotten an ATV to boot from a mini PCIe SATA interface? If so, how? Getting rid of the PATA drive would be nice.

Observations:
1. If I wanted any hope of closing the ATV in its original case, I'd need right-angle SATA cables. I would also need to hack a connection to the internal power supply to power the SATA drive, probably from the PATA interface connector. I'm planning a power supply upgrade and at least 1 3.5 inch drive, so this does not really apply to me.

2. Wipe the SATA drive you test with. I used an old drive out of my laptop that I'd not gotten around to erasing yet. It took me hours to figure out why the ATV Finder wouldn't start with the drive mounted.

3. You can get all the kexts you need from the 10.4.8 combo updater. Not 10.4.7, not 10.4.9, it must be 10.4.8 or the kexts will fail dependency checks at load time.

4.The AppleTV's 802.11n airport card is now happily pulling down the internets in my '06 mac mini. It's a standard airport card. So if your first gen AppleTV dies, be sure to harvest the wifi card out of it before sending it to the recycler.
 
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