A Step-by-Step Tutorial to Upgrading an AppleTV's Internal Hard Drive

Why Would You Need To?

The AppleTV debuted with a 40GB and 160GB internal 2.5” PATA HD. For those of you with a moderately sized iTunes Library this poses quite a problem if you want to store your media locally on the AppleTVʼs small drive. You could stream your iTunes Library and compromise your networks throughput, but why do that when you can upgrade the internal drive and store everything locally?

Upgrading your AppleTVʼs HD is a two-part process and I have compiled instructions after much frustration dealing with all of the online tutorials.

Letʼs first discuss the items required for this upgrade.

Required Items:

• TORX 8 and 10 driver to remove the screws
• USB to 2.5” PATA/IDE adapter (2 or one depending on which method you use, See below).
• Basic understanding of the Terminal application
• Patience

Step 1: Removing the hard drive from inside the AppleTV

The first thing you need to do is slowly remove the rubber covering on the bottom of the AppleTV. I found this step to be a lot easier by simply peeling back the rubber juenough to access the screws. There is one screw in each corner and 4 screws that hold the 2.5” PATA drive to the bottom of the AppleTV.

Once you have removed all 8 screws itʼs time to prop up the bottom of the AppleTV and expose all of its internals. All thatʼs left now is to removed the HD from the PATA connector (click on an image to see it enlargened).

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That was the short and easy part. Now for the real challenge.

Step 2: Migrating the partition structure on the old drive to the new drive.

The preparation of the new drive is challenging due to the partition structure on the AppleTV. If you connect the old drive in Disk Utility you will most likely see three Volumes; disk*s* (where the * will depend on your specific computer. Most likely it will be disk2s1. This is also the “Factory Restore” partition on your AppleTV); you will see OSBoot (which is the OS), and finally Media (which is obviously the reason you are upgrading this drive in the first place so you have more room for your locally stored media). What you donʼt see is the EFI partition.

However, if you open up Terminal and type in diskutil list you should get something like this:

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Depending on which OS you are using (10.4 or 10.5) the line with 5265636F-7665-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC may also read Apple_Recovery. In fact, in Disk Utility, towards the bottom the Volume name should read Apple_Recovery.

So you just used your first Terminal command of many needed for this project. The diskutil list is very useful for breaking down where your drives are located (i.e. /dev/disk1 /dev/disk2). Going forward it is imperative that you choose the correct drive to perform your commands on. If you perform a command on any other drive you may accidentally erase some data.

Now that you can see the basic structure of the AppleTVʼs HD you must now make an exact copy of the information on this drive so that you can clone it to the new drive.

There are actually two options for this step, the short and the long. Below I will provide both options on the next page starting with the short.