Apple TV Hacked

Well, it took a couple of goes, mainly due to limitations in OSX 10.5 and most instructions on the net being tailored for 10.4. However, as you can see from the image I now have a 250GB drive working in my ATV. So, how did I do it....?

Prerequisites: The AppleTV, Some star screwdrivers, a sharp knife, a new EIDE 2.5" drive (in my case a WD 250GB model) and two EIDE-USB converters.

Step1 - break open the ATV. I started at one corner and slowly eased the rubber base off. I did this asap after switching the ATV off so it was still warm. I used a sharp knife to *help* along any stubborn bits. In the end it came off quite cleanly. You can then use the star bits to take the base off, and a smaller bit to remove the old HDD.

Step2 - Connect the ATVs disk to one of the USB converters, do the same with the new disk. Fire up OSX and plug both in.

Step3 - You now have to copy one drive to the other, there are more clever ways of doing this but OSX 10.5 does some weird things with partitions, so unless you have 10.4 or a MSc in Unix then simply do the following. You must, of course, first know which disk is which - a simple diskutil list will show you.

dd if=/dev/disk1 op=/dev/disk2 bs=1m

Step4 - After some hours (yes, it takes ages) your disks will have copied over. Voila you might think - but alas, no. If you put the new disk in now it will not work for two reasons, firstly there are .Spotlight-V100 folders in both the OSBoot and Media partitions, and secondly the ATV (unlike smaller disks) will not expand to fill the 250GB using a restore. So, we must destroy and then recreate the Media partition. By the way, at this point you can eject the original disk: diskutil eject /dev/disk1.

diskutil eject /dev/disk2
gpt remove -i 4 disk2

Now you must figure out the starting point of the new partition using diskutility list (you are looking for the starting block of the free space - I'll use XXXXX for now

gpt add -b XXXXX -i 4 -t hfs /dev/disk2

Step5 - At this point we are close, one last thing it to remove those .Spotlight-V100 folders.

cd /Volumes/OSBoot
ls -a
rm -rf .Spotlight-V100
cd ..
cd Media
ls -a
rm -rf .Spotlight-V100
cd ..
diskutil eject /dev/disk2

Step6 - Now you are nearly done, plug the new disk into the ATV, reassemble and start up. It should boot at which point perform a factory reset. If all goes well you will be on V1 of the ATV software with a bigger Media partition, now you can upgrade the software in the normal way and connect iTunes, etc.

Much thanks to the guys at awkwardtv.org for the pointers on this.