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

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