Upgrading Apple TV's hard drive Page 3 of 3

Boosting your Apple TV’s capacity, step-by-step

by Dan Frakes, Macworld.com

The joys of repartitioning

You might think you’re ready to stick the new drive into your Apple TV at this point, but there’s one problem: The new drive’s partitions are exactly the same size as those of the original. In other words, right now, your new drive appears to be a 40GB drive . (Go ahead, do a Get Info on the new Media partition and you’ll find that it’s only 36GB.) Where did all that extra space you paid good money for go? It’s there, but it isn’t (yet) being used. You need to repartition the drive—meaning rearrange the drive’s segments—so that the Media partition includes the extra space.

I recommend using Coriolis Systems’s $50 iPartition for this step if you’ve got some cash to spare (or already have the utility). After launching iPartition and choosing the new drive from the app’s list of drives, you’ll see a pie chart of the drive’s partitions, including all unused space in gray. You simply drag the edge of the Media “piece” of the pie so that it encompasses all that gray area and then click the Commit button in the toolbar. In a matter of seconds, your Media partition is its rightful size. And because there was no data on that free space, you don’t even have to worry about losing data—generally one of the risks of repartitioning a drive. (If you’ve already got a copy of Prosoft’s Drive Genius or Micromat’s DiskStudio sitting around, these utilities also let you repartition a drive without reformatting it.)

If you don’t already have a partitioning utility, and you don’t feel like springing for one, the process is still doable, but a bit more complicated (and perhaps a bit intimidating if you’re not comfortable with Terminal). Here are the steps; if at any time you see the Finder’s “unrecognized volume” error, click on Ignore:

diskutil list

diskutil eject disk#

gpt remove -i ## disk#

gpt remove -i 4 disk4

gpt

diskutil eject disk#

gpt show disk#

	start       size  index  contents

	0          1         PMBR

	1          1         Pri GPT header

	2         32         Pri GPT table

	34          6

	40      69632      1  GPT part - C12A7328-...

	69672     819200      2  GPT part - 5265636F-...

	888872    1843200      3  GPT part - 48465300-...

	2732072  312581775

	312581775         32         Sec GPT table

	312581807          1         Sec GPT header
	

You’ll notice one very large empty area; that’s the space that’s currently unused. On my drive, it starts at block number 2732072 and is 312581775 blocks in size. (In the output above, I’ve shortened the contents column for index 1, 2, and 3 to fit this page; you’ll see much longer strings of characters in your output.)

diskutil eject disk#

	gpt add -b
	START
	-i 4 -s
	SIZE
	-t hfs /dev/disk#
	

gpt

diskutil eraseVolume “Journaled HFS+” Media /dev/disk#s4

Whew! Your Media partition should reappear in the Finder; Get Info on it to see its new, more spacious size. In my case, nearly 148GB. (The free space is less because I performed my upgrade after having synced data from iTunes to the original drive, and I used iPartition to resize the Media partition; so my original data was preserved. If you used the Terminal method to repartition, your Media volume will be empty.)

Putting it back together

Now it’s time to put your Apple TV back together again, a fairly painless process. First, connect the ATA cable to the new drive. Then place the two adhesive pads on the drive in the same locations from which you removed them from the original drive: the large double-stick pad goes on the bottom (the side with the four mounting-screw holes), the small pad goes in the lower-right corner.

Gently press the drive against the Apple TV’s bottom plate so that the drive’s four mounting-screw holes line up with the four holes on the bottom plate; then replace the four Torx-8 screws and tighten them. Finally, replace the bottom plate and fasten it in place with the four Torx-10 screws.

Connect the Apple TV’s power and connection cables (the latter I’m assuming are already hooked up to your TV), and the Apple TV should start up normally. If it doesn’t, don’t worry—there’s one more step you should take, regardless of whether or not the new drive works right away. I recommend using the Apple TV’s Restore feature to reset your Apple TV back to its original configuration. If you’d previously been using your Apple TV, this means you’ll have to go through the setup process again, including re-syncing your media, but the Restore process ensures that your new drive is in like-new working order.

To perform a restore, hold down the Menu and Down (-) buttons simultaneously for approximately six seconds; you’ll eventually see the Apple TV’s status light blink off and then on again. This will bring up the language-selection screen, and then the Apple TV Recovery screen, which gives you options to Restart, Run Diagnostics, or perform a Factory Restore.

Select Factory Restore and press the Play button; confirm your selection on the next (“Are you sure?”) screen and the restore process will begin. It should take only a few minutes; you’ll see a progress dialog on the screen during the process. Once the restore is complete, the Apple TV will restart, the initial startup movie will play, and the setup process will begin.

Once you’ve completed setup, go to the Apple TV’s Settings menu, and then choose About; assuming all went well, the Capacity should now reflect the larger size of your new drive!

You should also see this new, larger size in the Summary screen of iTunes’ Apple TV display. For example, here's mine just after syncing started:

[ Senior Editor Dan Frakes writes the Mac Gems weblog and reviews for Playlistmag.com. ]

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