Apple TV repair

Backup

I wish I had a backup of my drive before the Apple TV went screwy, but I made a backup of the screwy state anyway. Here's how:

I unplugged the device, then I removed the hard drive. I skipped the hair-dryer step, which was a mistake. iFixit has guides for disassembling the machine: http://www.ifixit.com/Device/Apple_TV_1st_Generation

(Before I attached the drive, I should have turned off Spotlight, so it wouldn't add search folders to two of the volumes).

I attached the drive, via USB <> PATA adapter, to my Mac. I unmounted the volumes on the drives using Disk Utility, which I kept open so that I could repeatedly unmount the drives easily while I worked.

I used gpt to view a snapshot of the partitions as they were. But first I found the name of the disk from Disk Utility by clicking on the drive and getting "Information." Your disk may be in a different slot of the /dev/disk# numbering order:

 gpt show /dev/disk1

Then I used dd to copy the entire drive as an image on my hard drive—make sure you have enough room, the ATV drive is at least 40GB. I put it in my Temp folder which I ordered Time Machine to ignore, so it doesn't bother backing up so huge a file.

sudo dd if=/dev/disk1 bs=1m of=~/Temp/appletv-orig.dmg

You can press control-T during the execution of dd to see the progress. It took me about two hours to copy this way.

to be continued

New hard drive

I've tried many different methods to copy what's on the old drive to the new drive. At the very least, supposedly, I need the partitions, with data in the recovery partition copied exactly. With that, "Factory Restore" should put everything back in order. I've tried online methods: http://www.engadget.com/2007/03/23/how-to-upgrade-the-drive-in-your-apple-tv/3 . This method balked at the re-addition of the fourth partition after removing it.

References

http://www.engadget.com/2007/03/23/how-to-upgrade-the-drive-in-your-apple-tv/