Easier Way To Upgrade Your Apple TV Hard Drive

  • Posted by DIYer
  • June 5, 2008

apple tv

Note: Use a IDE 2.5” Hard drive otherwise known as a PATA hard drive

Please look at Engaget.com To view excellent instructions on taking apart your apple tv.

I tried and tried to use their method to copy the apple TV but it never worked for me. I’ve included below all the info you should need to successfully put a larger hard drive into your apple tv. I used this method with an Apple G5.

Copying the Apple TV to your computers hard drive

First you want to copy your hard drive using a usb to 2.5” IDE adapter.

Plug in the hard drive

Open Terminal

Type:diskutil list

Get the disk number of your formatted hard drive. It should be something like disk1.

(VERY IMPORTANT: I will use disk1 in the examples but please make sure you identify the correct hard drive (your drive may be called disk2, disk3 or so on) so you don’t erase the wrong hard drive.)

Type:dd if=/dev/disk1 of=./AppleTV.dmg bs=1m

This will take around 2 hours to copy the drive with a USB adapter. It does not tell you the status but will show you the info below when finished.

terminal

Type:diskutil eject disk1

Remove the old Apple TV hard drive and plug in the clean larger hard drive.

Apple TV hard drive preparation

Open Disk Utility

Click Partition

Set Volume Scheme to 1 Partition

Set Format to Mac OS Extended (Journaled)

Click the options button and choose GUID Partition Table

Click Apply

Open Terminal

Type: diskutil list

Again get the disk number of your formatted hard drive. It should be something like disk1. (VERY IMPORTANT: I will use disk1 in the examples but please make sure you identify the correct hard drive (your drive may be called disk2, disk3 or so on) so you don’t erase the wrong hard drive.

Type: gpt destroy /dev/disk1

Type: gpt create /dev/disk1

Type:diskutil list

Now hopefully you will see this:

/dev/disk1

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: GUID_partition_scheme *123.5 Gi disk1

You are finished preparing your hard drive.

Copying to the new hard drive

Copy the disk image to the new hard drive

Type:dd if=./AppleTV.dmg of=/dev/disk1 bs=1m

Again you will get a message like

terminal

The Media and OS Boot partitions will appear on your desktop

First we eject the disk, we have to do this every time we run gpt or you will get an error

Type:diskutil eject disk1

Then we remove the old Media Partition. (don’t remove the wrong one!)

Type:gpt remove -i 4 disk1

Type:diskutil eject disk1

Then find our new start and size.

Type:gpt show disk1

This will show something like this.

terminal apple tv

If you look just above the Sec GPT table we will see that the empty space starts at 3141672 and is 74998455 in size so we will use those in our next command.

Eject the disk again.

Type:diskutil eject disk1

Then create the new partition, using the info from the last step. (your info may vary)

Type:gpt add –b 3141672 –i 4 –s 74998455 –t hfs /dev/disk1

Type:diskutil eject disk1

Then type:diskutil

This should show that the media partition is a larger size now.

Put the drive back into the Apple TV. The hard drive will still show 40 gigs. Do a factory restore and you should be set. This is what worked for me. It may not be the fast way but I bet it is the simplest for most people new to terminal.

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June 5th, 2008
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Reader Comments

Comment Number:
1
Written by:
Eddy
Posted on:
June 5, 2008 at 1:54 pm

Worked great! Thanx

Comment Number:
2
Written by:
u72
Posted on:
June 12, 2008 at 4:56 am

Worked great for me in Leopard using a 250gig WD 5400 Drive

gpt add –b 3141672 –I 4 –s 74998455 –t hfs /dev/disk1

Should be a small -i (An Uppercase ‘-I’ Stuffs it up! :p)
Line should be :
gpt add –b 3141672 –i 4 –s 74998455 –t hfs /dev/disk1

If your using version 1.0 restore – you will get a finder crashing loop at the moment from apples servers as the apple tv tries to ‘cache’ top ten lists that have error data for v1.0 software – work around is either leave it – it settles after 30 or so mins – or disconect the apple tv from the net. its a known issue and is detailed here

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1550474&tstart=15

thanks for a great tutorial :)
u72

Comment Number:
3
Written by:
Jason
Posted on:
June 27, 2008 at 2:08 pm

Has anyone tried this with a version 2.0 AppleTV? I tried repeatdely using DD to create an image file and it failed after OSBoot trying to copy the hidden parition. I ended up copying the entire drive using CopyCatX and then iPartition to resize the media partition. Luckily I already owned both pieces of software.

Comment Number:
4
Written by:
u72
Posted on:
July 11, 2008 at 9:06 am

i’ve successfully upgraded to 2.1 (the version that allows you to use airtunes with your iPhone/Ipod Touch as a ’sonos type’ remote with the apple TV) and it works perfectly – Also the Finder Crashing bug with version 1.0 is now fixed and doesn’t affect new installs of v1.0

u72

Comment Number:
5
Written by:
Pablo
Posted on:
July 18, 2008 at 6:49 pm

I didn’t find any 250G IDE 2.5 HDD in Amazon. What I did find were SATA drivers. Will a SATA drive work? Or it has to be IDE?

Thanks

Comment Number:
6
Written by:
DIYer
Posted on:
July 18, 2008 at 7:19 pm

There are fewer IDE 2.5″ hard drives out there. I know best buy sells a 160 gig hard drive in the store last time I checked, but it isn’t available online. You might be able to use a hard drive adapter for an sata drive but you won’t be able to fit the hard drive back into the case.

Comment Number:
7
Written by:
Rob
Posted on:
August 16, 2008 at 9:27 am

Thank you for this great tutorial. Alo I was struggeling for hours with different tutorials, but yours did the trick!!

I upgraded my atv from 40gb to 250gb.

Regards from Holland.

Comment Number:
8
Written by:
Zeus
Posted on:
September 20, 2008 at 5:19 am

Thank you for writing this! It is much more thorough than Engadget’s.

Comment Number:
9
Written by:
Matt MacDougall
Posted on:
December 10, 2008 at 3:32 pm

Works great, thanks!

Comment Number:
10
Written by:
Juan
Posted on:
January 10, 2009 at 4:08 pm

Thanks for the great tutorial but I’m stuck with a problem at the point during the new drive preparation where I’m using the command gpt destroy /dev/disk1

disk1 is the correct disk in this case and it seems to be partitioned correctly using the disk utility window but when I enter the destroy command, it says:
gpt destroy: unable to open device ‘/dev/disk1′: No such file or directory. I’m stuck at this point, can anyone offer any suggestions? Thanks in advance.

Comment Number:
11
Written by:
Juan
Posted on:
January 10, 2009 at 9:54 pm

OK forget my last comment. I figured it out using the Disk Utility without the terminal. I just copied the 3 partitions of the stock 40 GB drive, then restored the OSBoot.dmg to a 900 MB partition and it worked great. Shame it didn’t work for me via the terminal but oh well. It’s done and now I have 228 GB to grow into…

Comment Number:
12
Written by:
Leon
Posted on:
January 17, 2009 at 5:13 pm

Hi Juan,

I am stock with the same message:
gpt destroy: unable to open device ‘/dev/disk1′: No such file or directory
. Can you help me understand how you copied the 3 partitions and restored the OSBoot.dmg to a 900MB partition?

A step by step review of what you did would be highly appreciated! Thanks in advance!

Any comments on the way to solve this issue with a terminal are very welcome too!

Comment Number:
13
Written by:
Ed
Posted on:
February 24, 2009 at 1:35 pm

I used these instructions and they were great. I also ran into the problem during the “gpt destroy” phase where it didn’t recognize it. To get around it, I used the following command:

gpt remove -i 4 disk1

The number “4″ refers to the partition that’s created during the format. I had two extra partitions, a “3″ and a “4″. I deleted both and then my new HD was at the standpoint in the instructions where DIYer says that’s its all prepared. Then everything as he suggests after that. Worked for me.

Comment Number:
14
Written by:
rocky911
Posted on:
March 7, 2009 at 6:54 pm

Just upgraded to 320GB. =)
Thanks! Great tutorial.

Comment Number:
15
Written by:
Matt
Posted on:
April 26, 2009 at 2:50 pm

I strongly recommend that no one following this page copy and paste any of the commands into the terminal. For some reason, dashes (-) on this page are not the same character as the dash that terminal recognizes.

If you copy and paste the command “gpt add –b 3141672 –i 4 –s 74998455 –t hfs /dev/disk1″ from this page, you will get a list of error messages beginning with “gpt add: unable to open device ‘–b’: No such file or directory” and you’ll mess up the entire partition scheme of your drive.

As far as I can tell, you have to start over more or less from the beginning of the section “Apple TV hard drive preparation” after this, including the two hour wait for “dd if=./AppleTV.dmg of=/dev/disk1 bs=1m” to finish.

Comment Number:
16
Written by:
Brian
Posted on:
June 6, 2009 at 11:49 am

Thanks for the great instructions. I upgraded from the 40GB to a WD 250GB. Where people are having trouble with the “gpt destroy /dev/disk1″ command, they need to “diskutil eject disk” first. I don’t know if it got remounted or what, but that fixed the error for me.

Comment Number:
17
Written by:
Scott Wright
Posted on:
July 9, 2009 at 5:25 am

Thanks for the instructions – worked like a charm on the first one. I did have to do an eject disk after partitioning the new drive.

I have two Apple TVs. Can I use the disk image from the first ATV on the second, in other words, skip the first part of copying the ATV disk image to my computer on the second one. The ATVs were bought at the same time and have the same size (40 GB) hard drives.

Comment Number:
18
Written by:
Scott Wright
Posted on:
July 9, 2009 at 12:34 pm

It is possible that I messed something up. But When I tried to use the disk image copied from ATV1 to write to ATV2, ATV2 booted fine, however it would not respond to the remote (the orangish light next to the ir window would blink indicating that it was receiving ir, but the remote would not do anything, even after two reboots).

I ended up doing the complete procedure from scratch on the second ATV – I now have two 300 GB (320 drives) ATVs and they are both working flawlessly!

Comment Number:
19
Written by:
Brad
Posted on:
July 21, 2009 at 8:04 am

I decided to set it up a notch and use a SATA drive (1tb) with a SATA>IDE converter. I followed the steps and everything seems to be working but I cannot see to get the AppleTV to reset, thus my capacity still shows ~144gb. When I go through the steps to reset I get an error message saying it cannot be reset.

Any thoughts?

Comment Number:
20
Written by:
DIYer
Posted on:
July 21, 2009 at 9:07 am

That’s a cool idea. I hope you get it working. see if this helps. http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/apple_tv_reset_from_the_couch/

Comment Number:
21
Written by:
bwaadass
Posted on:
July 28, 2009 at 7:21 am

Good guide, will be trying this later today! I think maybe the penultimate command to eject disk is wrong though as you have “Type: diskutil eject disk2″ whereas every other command should reference disk 1? Thanks!

Comment Number:
22
Written by:
DIYer
Posted on:
July 28, 2009 at 7:55 am

I updated it to disk1 Thanks for noticing it!

Comment Number:
23
Written by:
bwaadass
Posted on:
August 4, 2009 at 8:23 am

No problem :-) . I think you also need to add an extra “Type: diskutil eject disk1″ command before you do the “Type: gpt destroy /dev/disk1″ step (otherwise you get the resource busy message). I followed this guide last night, now need to put the HDD back in the Apple TV and test it!!

Comment Number:
24
Written by:
bwaadass
Posted on:
August 5, 2009 at 2:42 am

Success! Worked perfectly, thanks very much for this guide!! I put in a 320gb Western Digital drive, which is much quieter than the existing Fujitsu one. One thing I’d also say is that Endgaget suggested that you’d need some spray adhesive to re-seal the rubber mat – for me that wasn’t required as the glue on the rubber stays tacky for some time (and I had mine off for 24hrs) so you will be ok to reapply it without additional glue.

Comment Number:
25
Written by:
trip
Posted on:
October 3, 2009 at 2:08 pm

Worked great on my Apple TV 2.4 box. However, I had to reset to factory defaults, then upgrade the unit back to 2.4, but it worked fine and now I have 200gb more than I had before.