Hey guys
Thought I'd share my experience today upgrading my 40GB Apple TV. I've had it for about 18 months now, so is well out of warranty.
I bought a Western Digital WD2500BEVE 250GB 2.5" hard drive and got it delivered on a Saturday from eBuyer.com. I originally ordered the 320GB drive, but I got an email stating the drive was no longer available. I rang them and changed the order to lower capacity drive.
So it arrived this morning just after 10am. I'd already bought an 8 piece torx screw driver set in preparation (you a need Torx 8 and a Torx 10 screw driver to perform the upgrade).
So - unplugged the Apple TV, and let it cool down a bit before flipping it over and removing the rubber foot. It was a lot easier to take off than what I had read and was still sticky. Unscrewed the 4 screws, one in each corner, then the 4 that hold the drive in place and carefully opened up the case. I prized the 40GB drive off the case and removed the IDE cable. I connected the drive to a USB adapter and plugged it into my 13" MacBook Pro. I was surprised that the drive mounted on the desktop as I hadn't plugged in the power cable to the adapter.
I'd read several articles on how to copy the various partitions off the drive to my MacBook Pro, but I thought I'd give atvcloner a go first (http://dynaflashtech.net/atvcloner/). It found the drive and showed the partitions and with a press of a button saved three disk images to my desktop, boot.dmg, efi.dmg and recovery.dmg. I ejected the two partitions on the desktop, waited for the drive to spin down before disconnecting it and plugging in the new drive. Once plugged back into the MBP, OS X immediately told me that the drive couldn't be read and needed to be initialized. This was a bit of a shock as I've become so used to drives being preformatted as NTFS or FAT32. I clicked the cancel button and fired up atvcloner again. After selecting the new drive, I chose the three disk images and clicked the prepare drive button. It promptly crashed and quit. Not panicking, I opened up Disk Utility and created one 250GB partition and wrote the changes to the drive. I then opened up atvcloner again, duplicated what I had done with the disk images and pressed the prepare drive button once more. This time it sat there and actually did something. After about 10 mins or so atvcloner told me it was complete and had already ejected the partitions off the desktop. I pulled out the USB cable and disconnected the drive.
I proceeded to put the Apple TV back together again, plugged in the HDMI cable and power cable and watched the light on the front flash. I was mildly concerned when no picture came onscreen, but realized the TV was set to the wrong input. Once I'd switched it over, I was greeted by the welcome screen and asked to choose a language. I was expecting this as I didn't see atvcloner copying the contents of the Media partition. I selected English and pressed OK. The Apple TV then asked me to select a wireless network, I chose mine and put in the password then was told setup was complete. 5 random numbers appeared on screen which I then typed into my Mac mini which houses all of the media. After pairing the two devices, the Apple TV showed 228.59GB under the capacity in iTunes. I was rather surprised that it still had the 3.0.2 firmware on as I expected it to have reverted back to version 2 which it shipped with. So even better and not having to redownload and install the 3.0.2 update.
Needless to say it has been a very painfree upgrade which was made extremely easy by atvcloner and the Upgrading Apple TV Hard Disk guide from Jamie Dresser which can be found here http://eshop.macsales.com/Reviews/Framework.cfm?page=/Tips/appletv/appletv.html
If anyone has an Apple TV that is out of warranty and is thinking of doing the upgrade, seriously, don't think about it, just do it
pac
Thought I'd share my experience today upgrading my 40GB Apple TV. I've had it for about 18 months now, so is well out of warranty.
I bought a Western Digital WD2500BEVE 250GB 2.5" hard drive and got it delivered on a Saturday from eBuyer.com. I originally ordered the 320GB drive, but I got an email stating the drive was no longer available. I rang them and changed the order to lower capacity drive.
So it arrived this morning just after 10am. I'd already bought an 8 piece torx screw driver set in preparation (you a need Torx 8 and a Torx 10 screw driver to perform the upgrade).
So - unplugged the Apple TV, and let it cool down a bit before flipping it over and removing the rubber foot. It was a lot easier to take off than what I had read and was still sticky. Unscrewed the 4 screws, one in each corner, then the 4 that hold the drive in place and carefully opened up the case. I prized the 40GB drive off the case and removed the IDE cable. I connected the drive to a USB adapter and plugged it into my 13" MacBook Pro. I was surprised that the drive mounted on the desktop as I hadn't plugged in the power cable to the adapter.
I'd read several articles on how to copy the various partitions off the drive to my MacBook Pro, but I thought I'd give atvcloner a go first (http://dynaflashtech.net/atvcloner/). It found the drive and showed the partitions and with a press of a button saved three disk images to my desktop, boot.dmg, efi.dmg and recovery.dmg. I ejected the two partitions on the desktop, waited for the drive to spin down before disconnecting it and plugging in the new drive. Once plugged back into the MBP, OS X immediately told me that the drive couldn't be read and needed to be initialized. This was a bit of a shock as I've become so used to drives being preformatted as NTFS or FAT32. I clicked the cancel button and fired up atvcloner again. After selecting the new drive, I chose the three disk images and clicked the prepare drive button. It promptly crashed and quit. Not panicking, I opened up Disk Utility and created one 250GB partition and wrote the changes to the drive. I then opened up atvcloner again, duplicated what I had done with the disk images and pressed the prepare drive button once more. This time it sat there and actually did something. After about 10 mins or so atvcloner told me it was complete and had already ejected the partitions off the desktop. I pulled out the USB cable and disconnected the drive.
I proceeded to put the Apple TV back together again, plugged in the HDMI cable and power cable and watched the light on the front flash. I was mildly concerned when no picture came onscreen, but realized the TV was set to the wrong input. Once I'd switched it over, I was greeted by the welcome screen and asked to choose a language. I was expecting this as I didn't see atvcloner copying the contents of the Media partition. I selected English and pressed OK. The Apple TV then asked me to select a wireless network, I chose mine and put in the password then was told setup was complete. 5 random numbers appeared on screen which I then typed into my Mac mini which houses all of the media. After pairing the two devices, the Apple TV showed 228.59GB under the capacity in iTunes. I was rather surprised that it still had the 3.0.2 firmware on as I expected it to have reverted back to version 2 which it shipped with. So even better and not having to redownload and install the 3.0.2 update.
Needless to say it has been a very painfree upgrade which was made extremely easy by atvcloner and the Upgrading Apple TV Hard Disk guide from Jamie Dresser which can be found here http://eshop.macsales.com/Reviews/Framework.cfm?page=/Tips/appletv/appletv.html
If anyone has an Apple TV that is out of warranty and is thinking of doing the upgrade, seriously, don't think about it, just do it
pac
TV to a cheap 120 GB drive (Fujitsu, 4200rpm, 8MB cache drive very similar in specs to the stock drive) and it now holds my entire 50GB media library. ATV cloner crashed on me a couple of times when attempting to copy the images to the new drive. Reformatting the target drive with Disk Utility and then reopening ATV cloner did appear to help. You will know that ATV cloner is successful when it creates a "media" and a "OS boot" partition on the new drive. This first time I ran ATV cloner, for some reason it successfully created the media partition, but not the boot partition, and I got a flashing question mark when I put this back in my 