My Apple TV's Hard Drive Is Dead

A couple weeks ago I rented Terminator Salvation on my Apple TV, and while the first half of the movie played just fine, the second half played horribly. Playback would freeze every couple of minutes, and after 20 seconds or so it would skip forward 2-3 minutes and the movie would resume playing. I had to skip back every time to see what I missed, so it took me two hours to watch the final hour of the movie. I was pretty certain it wasn't a problem with downloading the movie data cleanly, but I didn't have time to troubleshoot it any further because of all of my holiday activities.

With the break here around New Year's, though, I thought I'd dig into it and see if I could fix whatever was wrong. So, I flipped my receiver to the Apple TV input and was greeted with the "reset" screen telling me there'd been a problem and asking whether I wanted to restart the Apple TV, do a hardware diagnostic, or do a factory restore. The diagnostic didn't turn up any problems, but every time I rebooted I ended back up at the reset screen. I couldn't do a factory restore, either, and since I'm long out of warranty there wasn't much to lose by opening up the box and pulling the hard drive to see what was up.

After a lot of research (more on this later) it looks like the 40 GB original hard drive in my Apple TV is failing. I have a 250 GB hard drive that I pulled from my MacBook Pro, but it has a SATA hard drive interface while the Apple TV uses a PATA interface. Over on the MacRumors forums, stevietech found a PATA-to-SATA converter and 8" cable that just barely fit inside the Apple TV case without modification. These pieces should let me re-use my old hard drive.

It'll take over a week for the parts to get here, but I'll let folks know how it goes. I hope that at the end of the day I'll have a fully-functioning Apple TV with some more storage space!

Comments

[Toby]

So did you get it working? How did you get an image off the ATV boot volume to load onto the new drive, if the other one was broken already?
Mine's pooched as well and I am trying to work out how to restore on a new HD, but I need an image to start with.

[sobiloff]

Yep, I got it working--mostly. Partition the new drive by following any of the drive upgrade instructions out there (for example, ). Download the latest OS image from Apple and put it in the boot partition. The drawback for me was that my recovery partition was toast, and I couldn't find a reliable recovery image on the net, so I had to leave that partition empty. The Apple TV will work without the recovery partition, but it won't be able to upgrade itself since part of the upgrade process is to boot from the recovery partition to install the update into the boot partition. This means you'll have to manually update the boot partition by downloading the latest OS image from Apple and "dd" it onto the boot partition.

Good luck!

[sobiloff]

Oh, hey, here's one other good Apple TV rebuild resource I bookmarked and should share: http://smallnum.blogspot.com/2008/02/re-creating-apple-tv-from-scratch.html.