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My 750 gig Apple TV

dynaflash said:
Well, realize as I said, there is *no* decrypting capability. None whatsoever. So you would have to rip it first.
Plus, with the stock atv software at least, your are limited to 540p afaik. er, at least at 29 fps. At 24 fps you could get 720p if you decrypt it first.
Click to expand...

Dyna,

Do any of the Windoze free-ware apps decrypt Blu-Ray discs? I have Win XP on my Hackintosh.
 
afaik the only one is anydvd HD. Never tried it myself though.
[Edit: realize you said freeware, anydvd HD is pay ware I believe]
 
Cave Man said:
How's the build going for you?
Click to expand...

I haven't really had much time to work on this at all. I was busy all weekend and have had to do a lot after work during the week. I'll probably try to reimage tomorrow.

EDIT: actually I might try to squeeze in the imaging this afternoon, sometime between podcast recording and softball.
 
So I tried imaging the drive again today. It gave me similar errors to what happened the first few times I tried imaging it. It happens when I try to resize the Media partition on the larger drive. Terminal process is below (disk8 is ATV drive, disk9 is larger drive)
EDIT: I am doing this on a 2.0 CD MBP running 10.5.3

Code: 
dan-druschs-macbook-pro-15:~ dandrusch$ dd if=/dev/disk8 count=1335 of=/dev/disk9 bs=1024k
1335+0 records in
1335+0 records out
1399848960 bytes transferred in 662.853847 secs (2111852 bytes/sec)
dan-druschs-macbook-pro-15:~ dandrusch$ diskutil eject disk9
Disk disk9 ejected
dan-druschs-macbook-pro-15:~ dandrusch$ gpt recover disk9
dan-druschs-macbook-pro-15:~ dandrusch$ diskutil eject disk9
Disk disk9 ejected
dan-druschs-macbook-pro-15:~ dandrusch$ gpt remove -i 4 disk9
disk9s4 removed
dan-druschs-macbook-pro-15:~ dandrusch$ diskutil eject disk9
Disk disk9 ejected
dan-druschs-macbook-pro-15:~ dandrusch$ gpt show disk9
      start       size  index  contents
          0          1         PMBR
          1          1         Pri GPT header
          2         32         Pri GPT table
         34          6         
         40      69632      1  GPT part - C12A7328-F81F-11D2-BA4B-00A0C93EC93B
      69672     819152      2  GPT part - 5265636F-7665-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC
     888824    1843192      3  GPT part - 48465300-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC
    2732016  974041119         
  976773135         32         Sec GPT table
  976773167          1         Sec GPT header

dan-druschs-macbook-pro-15:~ dandrusch$ diskutil eject disk9
Disk disk9 ejected
dan-druschs-macbook-pro-15:~ dandrusch$ gpt add -b 2732016 -i 4 -t hfs /dev/disk9
/dev/disk9s4 added
dan-druschs-macbook-pro-15:~ dandrusch$ diskutil eraseVolume "Journaled HFS+" Media /dev/disk9s4

DiskManagement setuid-tool failure
dan-druschs-macbook-pro-15:~ dandrusch$
 
Cave Man said:
If I understand correctly, you're using dd to do a byte-by-byte copy from one physical drive to another? I think dd will give you troubles if you do that. Have you imaged your ATV drive to a disk image file first, then to the new drive?
Click to expand...

That was how I tried it the first time. This was given as an option in the Engadget article on cloning the ATV drive.
 
Here's what I've done:

1. Factory restore of the ATV's hard drive to delete all unnecessary files from the Media partition.

2. Connect the ATV hard drive to my Mac with a USB drive adapter.

3. Launch Disk Utility and zero out the Media and OSBoot partitions. This allows for 98% compression of the disk image to be made in the next step.

4. Unmount and image the disk using dd: dd if=/dev/diskX of=ATVdisk.img bs=1024k

This took about 2 hours on my old Mini and generated a 37 gb image file on my Mac's hard drive in my home directory. At this point, I used OS X's archive utility (right-click, compress) to compress the disk image to less than 500 mb, small enough to put on a CD. This step is not necessary if you never plan to reimage the drive, but I'd used it many times so it might be worthwhile to do so.

5. Connect the new drive to your Mac and do the dd reverse: dd if=ATVdisk.img of=/dev/diskX bs=1024k

This has always worked for me.
 
Nice thing there is you actually create the media partition instead of back it up. So you only backup OSBoot, EFI and Restore which are considerably smaller and transfer much quicker.

Stick with it. Like all things, once its done it is well worth it. And unless your run out of room, you won't have to go through any jacking around just because apple decides to push a little atv software goodness, you'll be golden.
 
Ok, so now I've got it booting up to the original 1.1 software. But now I've got a new problem. I can't update the software. It will download it and I say update now, it reboots, and it's still 1.1. I tried doing a factory restore, but it just boots up even when holding - and menu.
 
Try this, it worked for me:

1. Download the 2.0.2 disk image from here.

2. Once downloaded, mount your new ATV hard drive on your Mac and launch Disk Utility. In Disk Utility, click on the OSBoot partition of your ATV drive and erase it. Note, this is the OSBoot partition only and not the entire drive.

3. Use the Restore function of Disk Utility to build your 2.0.2 OSBoot partition by dragging the 2.0.2 image to the Source box and your ATV's OSBoot partition to the Destination box.

Whole process should only take a couple of minutes and you should now have an Apple TV with 2.0.2 bootable.
 
I think I've finally got it! Now just to get the case worked out.

EDIT: I just realized how long it's going to take to transfer 500GB over ethernet...
 
Cave Man said:
Great news. Did you get the autoupdate to work, or was it the restore method?
Click to expand...

I ended up doing the restore method... for both the new one and the original... forgetting to change a 2 to a 1 can make a big difference:eek:

I'm still looking for a 1TB drive to use because I have 534GB in TV shows alone.
 
Only issue I have here (and its an admittedly small one) is that if the power goes out and comes back on, the atv is left with the flashing question mark hard drive icon. Presumably this is because at least in my case, the atv must fire back up first and tries to access the drive before the drive gets powered up. A quick restart of the drive solves it and restores full eSata goodness :) . Minor but worth noting.
 
Just a late footnote: wife wanted a bigger HD tv. So we got one and grabbed another atv. Of course I had another set of components already in stock for this mod. No sooner did I open the new atv than I tore out the hokey stock hdd and performed the eSata mod.

Happy to report all was flawless and now I am happily running a 500 GB and 1 TB atv here and all is well. :)
 
dynaflash said:
Just a late footnote: wife wanted a bigger HD tv. So we got one and grabbed another atv. Of course I had another set of components already in stock for this mod. No sooner did I open the new atv than I tore out the hokey stock hdd and performed the eSata mod.
Click to expand...

Where can I get a wife like that? :)

Happy to report all was flawless and now I am happily running a 500 GB and 1 TB atv here and all is well. :)
Click to expand...

So jealous, so jealous...
 
Full circle

Well, I finally bought the 750 gb eSATA drive for my ATV. I didn't want to have to resync everything, so here's what I did:

1. Used 'dd' in terminal to put my original 40 gb ATV disc image onto the 750 gb drive.
2. Used iPartition to increase the Media partition to the volume's capacity (694 gb :D).
3. Used Disk Utility to erase both the OSBoot and Media partitions.
4. Used Disk Utility's Restore function to put the ATV 2.0.2 disc image from Apple onto the OSBoot partition.
5. Used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone my old eSATA drive's Media partition to the new drive's Media partition.

Plugged it in and the ATV booted just as the old drive. No resyncing, no rejoining the network, nor any of that other stuff that comes with a clean install. Now, back to all that high-def video Dolby Digital transcoding... :eek:
 

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AliensAreFuzzy said:
So I tried imaging the drive again today. It gave me similar errors to what happened the first few times I tried imaging it. It happens when I try to resize the Media partition on the larger drive. Terminal process is below (disk8 is ATV drive, disk9 is larger drive)
EDIT: I am doing this on a 2.0 CD MBP running 10.5.3

[/code]
Click to expand...

I had the same problem when I added a 250GB drive into my Apple TV. Here is how to fix it.

Instead of typing this:

diskutil eraseVolume "Journaled HFS+" Media /dev/diskXs4

And getting this error:

DiskManagement setuid-tool failure

Type this:

newfs_hfs -J -v Media /dev/diskXs4

(Replace X with your drive number)

Eject the disk and it will have expanded the media partition and will work perfectly. All in all it only takes 20 minutes to upgrade the HD in the Apple TV. Just backup the OSBoot partition only, restore it to the new drive, and then create and expand the Media partition.
 
So I replied on dyna's thread on the Handbrake forums and I thought I'd reply here as well. I've gotten pretty far but am stuck when trying to get the AppleTV to boot. I set up the drive multiple times and I know it's correct. The partitions and everything are correct, the EFI and Restore partitions are correct, everything should be set. I did a restore from the 2.0.2 image from Apple using Diskutility as shown earlier in the thread to make OSBoot a bootable copy of 2.0.2 and all the files show up correctly. When I plug everything in to the AppleTV and try to start it up the drive spins up and I can hear it doing something, but the Apple logo shows up and never goes away. Sometimes it flashes on and off like it's restarting, but I left it for a good 40 minutes and it never got past that logo. The media partition is correct though empty, but from my understanding that shouldn't make a difference. Here's what my drive looks like, which should be right:

Code: 
/dev/disk2
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *372.6 Gi   disk2
   1:                        EFI                         34.0 Mi    disk2s1
   2:             Apple_Recovery                         400.0 Mi   disk2s2
   3:                  Apple_HFS OSBoot                  900.0 Mi   disk2s3
   4:                  Apple_HFS Media                   371.3 Gi   disk2s4

and

Code: 
iMac.local root$ gpt show /dev/disk2
      start       size  index  contents
          0          1         PMBR
          1          1         Pri GPT header
          2         32         Pri GPT table
         34          6         
         40      69632      1  GPT part - C12A7328-F81F-11D2-BA4B-00A0C93EC93B
      69672     819200      2  GPT part - 5265636F-7665-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC
     888872    1843200      3  GPT part - 48465300-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC
    2732072  778690663      4  GPT part - 48465300-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC
  781422735         32         Sec GPT table
  781422767          1         Sec GPT header

What do you guys think? Is there something I'm missing?
 
OK, a little info please.

1. You have done the eSATA hack using a PATA to SATA controller? Which one?
2. How are you building your disk's file structure? Are you using dd to put a disk image onto it? If so, have you tried to boot without resizing the Media partition?
 
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