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My 750 gig Apple TV

Cave Man said:
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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Yes. I used the Syba controller listed in Dynaflash's how-to post on the Handbrake forums. I used all the parts he listed in the post.

I have images of the EFI partition and the Recov. partition on my computer from when I imaged my original drive. Quite a while ago I replaced the 40GB drive for a 250GB drive and am now trying to go larger. I'm using the same method I used back then which worked on the 250GB drive, it just doesn't seem to want to boot past the Apple logo on my eSATA drive. I tried swapping my enclosure to another one but that didn't seem to change anything either. I'm at a loss and I need to get this thing going so I can get the living room back together!

I've tried to boot with the smaller Media partition, I've tried to boot with no media partition, and I've tried resizing it. It seems like everything I try makes for the same result. Looks like the drive is doing something (and the light on both the drive enclosure and bridge blinking makes it seem like data is being transfered) but the Apple logo is as far as I get.

EDIT: I'm using a Western Digital SATA drive, has anybody else tried using one of those? Is there a problem with the drive maybe?
 
Vortec4800 said:
Yes. I used the Syba controller
Click to expand...

OK, that's the one that works for sure.

I have images of the EFI partition and the Recov. partition on my computer from when I imaged my original drive.
Click to expand...

(Notes plural use of 'images') Did you image the entire drive, or did you image each individual partition? If you did individual images, this is likely the problem. I have come to the conclusion that the EFI and recovery partition have to be at specific places on the drive. If they're not there, you will not be able to boot.

EDIT: I'm using a Western Digital SATA drive, has anybody else tried using one of those? Is there a problem with the drive maybe?
Click to expand...

During my testing, I used a WD 80 gb notebook SATA drive and it worked just fine, so I doubt that's the issue.
 
Cave Man said:
(Notes plural use of 'images') Did you image the entire drive, or did you image each individual partition? If you did individual images, this is likely the problem. I have come to the conclusion that the EFI and recovery partition have to be at specific places on the drive. If they're not there, you will not be able to boot.
Click to expand...

Yes they are separate images. I checked the layout of the partitions on my working 250GB internal drive and the external SATA drive and all the locations are exactly the same. I was going to do a whole image but I don't have the 40GB drive anymore, only the 250GB drive and it takes a REALLY long time to do a single image of a 250GB drive. Looking at the layout of the drives, I don't think the placement is a problem just because it's exactly the same between the two.
 
Cave Man said:
Maybe I should ask the obvious: Did you try to do a factory restore before resizing the Media partition?
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No, I can't get the AppleTV to boot at all in order to have the option to do a factory restore. Maybe tonight I'll try to do a full image?
 
Well, we might as well work on this here instead of two forums.

Vortec4800 said:
EDIT: I'm using a Western Digital SATA drive, has anybody else tried using one of those? Is there a problem with the drive maybe?
Click to expand...

As my pics and article show. I am using both a 500 gb wd mybook and a 1 TB mybook. So I know it can work with those drives.

I am going to go on a limb and say its either the bridge, or something about that drive imaging. Though its late and I cannot figure out what could be wrong with the drive image.

To verify: are you getting a flashing logo, or a flashing no drive (question mark) icon ?

Also, just for kicks did you try running it in "upside down test mode" without the ribbon cable just to rule that out ?
 
Hey do you still have your 40gb image file? If I send you a server to use can you upload it so I can use that, an image that is known working?
 
Cave Man said:
You've tried simultaneously holding the - and menu buttons for 6 seconds?
Click to expand...

Didn't know that would do anything. I'll give it a shot and let you know what happens.

dynaflash said:
Well, we might as well work on this here instead of two forums.



As my pics and article show. I am using both a 500 gb wd mybook and a 1 TB mybook. So I know it can work with those drives.

I am going to go on a limb and say its either the bridge, or something about that drive imaging. Though its late and I cannot figure out what could be wrong with the drive image.

To verify: are you getting a flashing logo, or a flashing no drive (question mark) icon ?

Also, just for kicks did you try running it in "upside down test mode" without the ribbon cable just to rule that out ?
Click to expand...

Good idea. It could be the bridge, but it's the one you listed in your thread and it at least sees the drive as it spools up and the Apple logo shows up. I'm getting a steady Apple logo (the Apple itself) and that's it. Sometimes it goes away and comes back after a few seconds, but that's it.

If the image is less than 17GB zipped up then put it here:

http://idisk.mac.com/cory.imdieke-Public
 
Vortec4800 said:
I'm getting a steady Apple logo (the Apple itself) and that's it. Sometimes it goes away and comes back after a few seconds, but that's it.
Click to expand...
Hmm, then methinks its your drive formatting or something. If it were hardware you should just get a flashing no drive icon.

Vortec4800 said:
If the image is less than 17GB zipped up then put it here:

http://idisk.mac.com/cory.imdieke-Public
Click to expand...
Um, no offense, but I am not uploading an atv drive image anywhere. Sorry. Besides, I thought earlier you said the one you have is right from your original 40GB atv drive ?

edit: Maybe cave man has some more ideas on your drive imaging. I think he has done it about as many ways as it can be done. ;)
 
dynaflash said:
Hmm, then methinks its your drive formatting or something. If it were hardware you should just get a flashing no drive icon.


Um, no offense, but I am not uploading an atv drive image anywhere. Sorry. Besides, I thought earlier you said the one you have is right from your original 40GB atv drive ?

edit: Maybe cave man has some more ideas on your drive imaging. I think he has done it about as many ways as it can be done. ;)
Click to expand...

Is there personal data stored on the image? I have two images, one for the EFI and one from the recovery partition. Cave Man said I should try one large image with the whole drive instead but I don't have the 40gb drive anymore just the 250gb drive and that's a huge image file and a really long time to make a block by block image of 250gb.
 
Vortec4800 said:
Is there personal data stored on the image?
Click to expand...
Huh ? Well first its illegal. Second, if I were to want to do it I surely wouldnt upload it to an apple server.

Frankly I would just try the 250 GB image transfer.

Actually I used three images when I did it. boot.dmg, efi.dmg and recovery.dmg I think you are missing the OSBoot part. At any rate you should have all of those available to you on your 250 GB drive don't you ?
 
dynaflash said:
Huh ? Well first its illegal. Second, if I were to want to do it I surely wouldnt upload it to an apple server.

Frankly I would just try the 250 GB image transfer.

Actually I used three images when I did it. boot.dmg, efi.dmg and recovery.dmg I think you are missing the OSBoot part. At any rate you should have all of those available to you on your 250 GB drive don't you ?
Click to expand...

They are available, but he said there may be a problem with the location of each partition on the drive and a single image would take care of that. I've repartitioned and done the drive quite a few times and I just can't get it to boot. I don't know what else to try or do.
 
I think there is something funky with your drive partitions. I don't have my drive hooked up to my mbp so I cannot verify exactly what it is. But have you gone through this :

http://wiki.awkwardtv.org/wiki/Prepare_a_Hard_Drive#Adding_the_OSBoot_and_Media_partitions

Note at the top of this part:
"The OSBoot and Media partitions have to be added and formatted first, otherwise diskutil gets confused by the EFI and Recovery partitions.

First add the OSBoot partition. "

Now, earlier you said you do not have the OSBoot image. Just EFI and Recovery as I recall. I really think you should consider grabbing fresh images off of your 250GB atv. Grab all three. And follow the instructions to the tee in that article above. Its the one I used and those guys know what they are talking about. When I was having hardware issues figuring out the cable and bridge, I must have done my drive like five times not knowing if that might not be the problem. Those instructions above were invaluable.

I always kick myself for not writing down precisely step by step how it did it but I pretty much followed their guide.

Remember:
"There is a little bit of voodoo involved in recreating the partitions on the new disk, because of strange behavior of diskutil. The OSBoot and Media partitions must be created and formatted before the EFI and Recovery partitions are on the disk. Otherwise, diskutil gets confused and does some strange things to the partition table. This method should take less than 10 minutes to complete, because only the EFI and Recovery partition are duplicated from the factory disk. The OSBBoot partition and Media get initialized by the Apple TV Factory Restore procedure."

Otherwise, if all else fails just image the new drive with the entire 250 GB drive from your atv. Yes, it will take some time, but its pretty much a set it and forget it type of deal.
 
dynaflash said:
I think there is something funky with your drive partitions. I don't have my drive hooked up to my mbp so I cannot verify exactly what it is. But have you gone through this :

http://wiki.awkwardtv.org/wiki/Prepare_a_Hard_Drive#Adding_the_OSBoot_and_Media_partitions

Note at the top of this part:
"The OSBoot and Media partitions have to be added and formatted first, otherwise diskutil gets confused by the EFI and Recovery partitions.

First add the OSBoot partition. "

Now, earlier you said you do not have the OSBoot image. Just EFI and Recovery as I recall. I really think you should consider grabbing fresh images off of your 250GB atv. Grab all three. And follow the instructions to the tee in that article above. Its the one I used and those guys know what they are talking about. When I was having hardware issues figuring out the cable and bridge, I must have done my drive like five times not knowing if that might not be the problem. Those instructions above were invaluable.

I always kick myself for not writing down precisely step by step how it did it but I pretty much followed their guide.

Remember:
"There is a little bit of voodoo involved in recreating the partitions on the new disk, because of strange behavior of diskutil. The OSBoot and Media partitions must be created and formatted before the EFI and Recovery partitions are on the disk. Otherwise, diskutil gets confused and does some strange things to the partition table. This method should take less than 10 minutes to complete, because only the EFI and Recovery partition are duplicated from the factory disk. The OSBBoot partition and Media get initialized by the Apple TV Factory Restore procedure."

Otherwise, if all else fails just image the new drive with the entire 250 GB drive from your atv. Yes, it will take some time, but its pretty much a set it and forget it type of deal.
Click to expand...

Those are the instructions I followed, but like you said there's no telling what could have happened to the partition table during the process. I started grabbing an image of my 250gb drive last night before I went to bed and it's still going, the image is about 200gb so far so it looks like I have another 50 or so left. When that's done I'll put it on the new drive and hopefully that will take care of the problem.

One thing I didn't like about those instructions was a couple of the steps don't work in 10.5.X which I'm using. It tells you a few different methods of doing those steps that do work but they aren't very specific and every time I tried it something different would happen. I thought I ended up getting it right in the end, but a full image like this will guarantee that it's correct.
 
I'm going to transfer the image to the new drive overnight tonight and will hopefully have good news on my progress tomorrow afternoon. The image process took just over 11 hours.

Hey dyna, I've got an unrelated question for you that I'm sure you'd know the answer to: I've got a bunch of movies I encoded from DVD using Handbrake and the AC3 passthrough (before AAC + AC3 was an option) and I was wondering if there was a way to have Handbrake take a movie like that and encode the AAC audio to basically convert it to an AAC + AC3 encode. Is that a possibility? Does that even make sense?
 
Vortec4800 said:
I was wondering if there was a way to have Handbrake take a movie like that and encode the AAC audio to basically convert it to an AAC + AC3 encode. Is that a possibility? Does that even make sense?
Click to expand...
Nope. Sorry. I mean, you *could* do it. But frankly it would be alot easier to just re-encode the source. Especially if you use a dev snapshot. You would gain some other benefits as well besides the aac + ac3 audio.

You must have built an svn version before we added the aac track. Afaik we never had a public release that only had AC3 in mp4 without an aac option.
 
dynaflash said:
reduces the "macroblocking" you get in dark scenes with x264 big time. Though we are derailing this thread a bit. Trust me, the reencoding time is worth it.
Click to expand...

Very cool, will have to use that for all my future encodes and maybe reencode some of my favorites... Any idea on when you guys will do a public release with the vaq and such? A week, a month, 3 months, etc?
 
Vortec4800 said:
Very cool, will have to use that for all my future encodes and maybe reencode some of my favorites... Any idea on when you guys will do a public release with the vaq and such? A week, a month, 3 months, etc?
Click to expand...
Not for a while, but now we periodically release compiled dev snapshots. They are in the announcement at the top of each HB forum.
 
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