October 31, 2024
How to Upgrade Your Apple TV Hard Drive Using ATVCloner

How to Upgrade Your Apple TV Hard Drive Using ATVCloner

Posted March 6, 2010 at 3:49pm by iClarified
These are simple instructions on how to upgrade your Apple TV Hard Drive using ATVCloner for Mac.

To follow this tutorial you need to remove the original hard drive out of your Apple TV. We won't cover that in this tutorial since its very simple to do and has been covered many times by other sites. Hint*: Just peel back the rubber bottom (use a blow dryer to melt the glue if necessary) and remove the four corner screws.

You will also need a usb harddrive enclosure to attach the original and new 2.5" IDE drive to your computer. It costs under $10.


Step One
Download ATVCloner from here

Step Two
Extract the ATVCloner archive and drag the extracted application into your Applications folder.
How to Upgrade Your Apple TV Hard Drive Using ATVCloner

Step Three
Insert your original AppleTV harddrive into the enclosure, connect the enclosure to your computer, and launch ATVCloner from your Applications folder.
How to Upgrade Your Apple TV Hard Drive Using ATVCloner

Step Four
ATVCloner will do a disc scan and display the result in the Activity Log. Locate your original Apple TV harddrive from the list and input its id into the Source Device ID field.
How to Upgrade Your Apple TV Hard Drive Using ATVCloner

Your original drive will have 4 partitions: EFI, Apple_Recovery, Apple_HFS OSBoot, and Apple_HFS Media. The drive id will look something like /dev/disk7.

Leave the Output Images Path as going to your desktop and click the Image Source Partitions ... button.
How to Upgrade Your Apple TV Hard Drive Using ATVCloner

You will be asked to confirm the action. Click the Continue button.
How to Upgrade Your Apple TV Hard Drive Using ATVCloner

Step Five
Once ATVCloner has created the boot.dmg, efi.dmg, and recovery.dmg files, the program will let you know it has completed. Click the OK button.
How to Upgrade Your Apple TV Hard Drive Using ATVCloner

How to Upgrade Your Apple TV Hard Drive Using ATVCloner

Step Six
You can now disconnect your original Apple TV drive and connect the new drive to your computer. Click to select the Partition New Drive tab and ATVCloner will once again do a scan of the drives connect.

Take a look at the recovery log and copy the new drive's id into the Target Device ID field. Use the size and volume name to help identify the new drive.
How to Upgrade Your Apple TV Hard Drive Using ATVCloner

Step Seven
Click the Choose... button for the Boot Image Path, EFI Image Path, and Recovery Image Path and select the corresponding boot.dmg, efi.dmg, and recovery.dmg we created earlier.
How to Upgrade Your Apple TV Hard Drive Using ATVCloner

How to Upgrade Your Apple TV Hard Drive Using ATVCloner

Step Eight
Click the Prepare New Drive... button then click Continue to confirm the new drive creation.
How to Upgrade Your Apple TV Hard Drive Using ATVCloner

How to Upgrade Your Apple TV Hard Drive Using ATVCloner

Step Nine
During the process of creating the new drive you will be prompted four times with The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer. message. Click the Ignore button.
How to Upgrade Your Apple TV Hard Drive Using ATVCloner

Step Ten
Once the new hard drive setup completes ATVCloner will let you know that if has finished. Click the OK button.
How to Upgrade Your Apple TV Hard Drive Using ATVCloner

You can now insert your new drive into the Apple TV and you are ready to go!
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Comments (5)
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MoeCurlyHoward
MoeCurlyHoward - February 16, 2015 at 5:48pm
Thanks for the link.
Jonhat
Jonhat - March 28, 2017 at 5:32pm
Is there anyone who has ATVCloner 2.0 I cant find it?
hand123
hand123 - October 20, 2013 at 9:01pm
Hello I'm planning to put Crystalbuntu on my ATV1. First I'm going to replace the existing internal HD with a bootable SD IDE interface and SD card. In order to install Crystalbuntu, I think I need the internal HD (SD in my case) to be ATV1 bootable with ATV1 3.0.2 OS. Therefore, I'm going to atvcloner from HD to SD. Do you know the minimum space required for an ATV1 clone? Thanks
Red.F
Red.F - October 21, 2013 at 11:07am
I'm sorry I left work in apple TV1 a long time ago So i can't help you .... I am really sorry .
mike
mike - March 24, 2013 at 4:43am
This doesn't work for me on a stock drive. I get permission denied when trying to make image source partitions. If it's a jailbroken drive then it makes the partitions without an issue.
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