Comments on: Easier Way To Upgrade Your Apple TV Hard Drive

By: trip

trip — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 19:08:42 +0000

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.

By: bwaadass

bwaadass — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 09:42:12 +0000

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.

By: bwaadass

bwaadass — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 15:23:38 +0000

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!!

By: DIYer

DIYer — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 14:55:47 +0000

I updated it to disk1 Thanks for noticing it!

By: bwaadass

bwaadass — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 14:21:46 +0000

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!

By: DIYer

DIYer — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 16:07:56 +0000

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/

By: Brad

Brad — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 15:04:52 +0000

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?

By: Scott Wright

Scott Wright — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 19:34:35 +0000

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!

By: Scott Wright

Scott Wright — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 12:25:32 +0000

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.

By: Brian

Brian — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 18:49:21 +0000

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.