[Alnitak]

On Tuesday, I had some free time, and I had heard that Best Buy was going to have some AppleTV's in stock. So, I ran over to Best Buy, and sure enough, they had two left. I grabbed one and grabbed a Seagate 160GB internal PATA 2.5" drive. All told, I spent about $475. I could have saved $30-40 on the drive buying it online, but this was for fun, and I was willing to lose the $299 on the AppleTV if I hosed it, so I was not concerned about an extra $30. Anyway...very successful. I now have just under 145GB of storage for media. Here's a few things learned along the way:

-The base comes off with screws that are hidden under the rubber cover, which you have to peel off.

-The hard drive is screwed to the base.

-The processor is on the reverse side of the PCB board, up against the top of the AppleTV. Lesson--don't put things on top of your AppleTV or you will lose some passive cooling.

-The first two tries failed. I had to *exactly* duplicate the AppleTV drive structure--400MB of free space, 900MB for the "OSBoot" partition, and then the rest of the space for the "Media" partition. I might have goofed something up, but when I didn't leave the 400MB of free space, it wouldn't finish booting.

-The OSBoot partitiion only uses about 450MB of the allocated 900MB, and is very clearly a stripped down version of OSX. Look at my image gallery to see some of the directories in the OSBoot partition. Two directories that are interesting to me are the Developer folder and the SeedScratch folder. There are some future options in there related to the Developer folder, I am sure...just not sure what.

Anyway, here is a shot after it booted up:



And here is a gallery of the whole process:
Inside the AppleTV Photo Gallery by Jeff Hapeman at pbase.com

Works like a champ, and much more room to store a bunch of DVDs ripped at 720x480.

Alnitak

[AC Rempt]

So what did you use to get the Seagate drive properly partioned and to get the AppleTV files on board? Just DiskUtility?

I love my AppleTV, and after playing with it, I can see the need for some more hard drive space. The other tutorials I've read on the Net seems pretty complex unless you want to spend more money on software, and right now, I don't.

[Alnitak]

I used Disk Utility. As I mention, you absolutely have to have that 400MB of unformatted "free space" for it to work.

Here's a procedure that worked:

Take a new drive, and partition it into three partitions. Disk Utility makes it hard to make partitions that are in the MB size; an easy way to do it is to put in 1GB manually, then it flips to MB, and you can manually type in the exact MB you want. Make a 400MB free space partition as the first partition. Set Disk Utility to leave it as Free Space or it will Mac-Format it. Make a 900MB partition and call it OSBoot. The rest of the disk can be partitioned as one big partition named Media. The OSBoot and Media partitions should be formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled), and under the "Options" settings button, you should click the radio button for "GUID Partition Table." This will let it boot from the Intel architecture in the AppleTV.

To make the copy, I used Disk Utility to make an image of the OSBoot partition on the AppleTV hard drive, then used the "Restore" function to restore that image to my new OSBoot partition on the replacement drive.

FYI--SuperDuper did NOT work.

Jeff

[AC Rempt]

Wow, that's a lot less complicated than so many other techniques I've read about. It may be time to go hard drive shopping. Thanks for the instructions.

[krove]

So your 400 MB partition is now empty, as opposed to containing a backup of the Apple TV OS? If anything goes wrong, you'll have to break open your Apple TV as opposed to restoring from this now empty partition...