Upgrading Apple TV

Recently I upgraded the hard drive in my AppleTV from 40GB to 160GB. The process was not entirely painless but in the end I managed to do it.

There are some good pages on how do to this, here on MacWorld, on Apple TV Hacks and on awkwardTV.

I got myself the Newer Technology’s USB 2.0 Universal Drive Adapter which allows me to hook up any kind of drive to a computer. A must if you work with hardware at all.

The simplest way to do this is as follows:

• Make a disk image of the Apple TV drive using dd.
• Write that disk image onto the new drive using dd.
• Unmount the drive using diskutil.
• Using gpt, delete the fourth partition (the Media partition) on the new drive.
• Unmount the drive using diskutil (again).
• Connect the new drive to the AppleTV, start it up
• Do a factory restore which will format the Media partition.
• You are good to go.

You can pick up all the commands from the various pages I point to, but if there is interest, I will post detailed step-by-step instructions.

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