How to Upgrade an Apple TV Hard Drive
- 1). Do it yourself by replacing the hard drive in your Apple TV. Slowly peel the rubber from the bottom of the unit, making sure not to tear it. Remove the four TORX screws in the unit corners. Gently remove the bottom unit with hard drive from the casing, making sure to not to dislodge the IDE cable.
- 2). Turn the bottom over to expose the hard drive and carefully lift the IDE cable up from the board. Grasp the hard drive securely and remove the remaining TORX screws. Detach the IDE cable from the drive and connect it to the USB adapter.
- 3). Connect the USB adapter to your Mac and open the Terminal utility. Type "diskutil" to locate the drive (it will be defined as "disk2" in the OSBoot and Media partitions). Type "dd if=/dev/disk2 of=/Users/Engadget/AppleTV.img bs=1024k" at the Terminal command line to copy the files to your Users folder. When the copy is finished a text window will indicate how many files were transferred.
- 4). Swap drives on the adapter. Verify the connection to new drive with diskutil. Type "dd if=/Users/Engadget/AppleTV.img count=1335 of=/dev/disk2 bs=1024k" at the Terminal command line. When the copy is complete type "diskutil eject disk2" to eject the disk.
- 5). Set up the drive by typing "gpt add -b 3141672 -i 4 -t hfs /dev/disk2" to add a new partition then "diskutil eraseVolume "Journaled HFS+" Media /dev/disk2s4" to format the disk.
- 6). Make sure no Spotlight files were added during the formatting process. Type "ls -a /Volumes/[Volume Name]" at the command line. You need to search both the "Media" and "OSBoot" volumes. If the files are present type "sudo rm -rf /Volumes/[Volume Name]/.Spotlight-V100" to erase the files. Type exactly because you could delete other files by accident.
- 7). Eject the disk with "diskutil eject disk2." Disconnect the newly drive and install it in your Apple TV (you will need to use spray adhesive to secure the rubber backing). Don't forget to delete the disk image from your Mac's Users folder when your Apple TV is up and running.
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