atvDrive 1.1 released

[nito]

6 am this time... and i wonder why i sleep till noon?

anyhow major bug fixed in partition maps for OSBoot > 1 GB (10.5 and 10.6 bug fix only, there is a different class that needs to be fixed for tiger in the application that will have to wait till next release)

update within the app itself or find the link in the first half of the post. -- wiki still forthcoming.

http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/ ... n2166.html

^^ some light extra reading for anyone who is curious about the hassle that is GPT partition maps.

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I will write up a more extended explanation, blog post and forum post later (4 am as usual)

Long story short atvDrive is a Mac OS X application (10.5+, 10.4 is supported but pretty buggy) that serves as a pretty easy to use UI wrapper for this wiki page:

http://wiki.awkwardtv.org/wiki/Prepare_a_Hard_Drive

pay close attention to notes in this particular section: http://wiki.awkwardtv.org/wiki/Prepare_ ... ing_OSBoot if you resize above 1000 MB for OSBoot for some of the potential problems and solutions.

without further adieu: http://nitosoft.com/atvDrive/atvDrive.zip

will probably add a section for this and atvPwn as well in the future (in the forum).

enjoy!

[webman2k]

Haven't used this tool, but it might convince me to finally upgrade the drive from the stock 40 - gets full rather fast

Question, how hard would it be to add some hacking options? Since this tool essentially installs an AppleTV OS on a blank drive (does it do that? Am I reading it right?) WHy not take it a step further and preinstall nitoTV, SSH, and the works, depending on which recovery image you have. Could save a lot of time after the install or after a drive failure, and would just be very cool

[WorkAH0lic]

For those of us who are not sumberged in the intricacies of GTP partitions and the idiosyncratic nature of an AppleTV partition scheme, would you be willing to write up some brief instructions on using the atvDrive wrapper in context of the post cited which explains the process manually? I think most people will only do this once or maybe twice in their lifetime and could use the idiot set of instructions in the interest of not sitting at our mac until 2am trying to figure out exactly how to make atvDrive do what we need it to do (properly format my new hard drive for my new apple TV). Do we still need to copy partitions from the original atv disk over to the new disk? Or does this utility handle that for us? Do I get both the original and the new drive attached to my macpro then run atvDrive? Or am I expected to dd the original first, then run atvDrive and do ... what?

I apologize if the answer is staring me in the face, and I gladly accept the lambasting if this is the case. Also, if you could even give me brief instructions, I know I can figure it out then I can write up some detailed instructions for the non-technical user.

Thank you,

Mike

[nito]

open /Applications/Utilties/Terminal.app

Code: Select all

mkdir ~/Library/Application\ Support/atvDrive
mkdir ~/Library/Application\ Support/atvDrive/Packages/
mkdir ~/Library/Application\ Support/atvDrive/PlugIns/


in that packages folder you can put in any properly formatted .tar.bz2 files to install onto the recovery partition, same with the PlugIns folder (the plugins dont need to be zipped or anything, just the plugins by themselves)

you dont need to unplug your appletv drive to get the recovery partition (although i guess it cant hurt since you need to unplug it anyway!) and it can be generated while sshed in

Code: Select all

sudo mount -uw /
sudo touch /.readwrite
cd ~/Documents
sudo dd if=/dev/disk0s2 of=recovery.dmg bs=1m


now if you do have the drive plugged in to your computer you can accomplish the same

Code: Select all

dd if=/dev/diskxs2 of=~/Library/Application\ Support/atvDrive/recovery.dmg


sub x in for the actual drive number, you can figure this out by typing 'mount' in the terminal and then look for the /dev/disk number that corresponds to your appletv hard drive.

if you want your appletv to restore to a newer version you can just put that OS.dmg in the application support folder and it will generate a recovery dmg from there. From there just plug in the new drive you want to format and open atvDrive. choose the device from the list, press prepare drive and wait. after its done your drive will be ready to go.

[ngiardina]

I purchased a new 160 GB HD to replace my fried atv hd. It is listed as one of the compatible hd's on the awkward tv wiki (WD Scorpio Blue 1600). I downloaded atvdrive and for some reason, it won't see the new 160 GB drive that I have plugged in and mounted via a USB enclosure. I haven't been able to find anything on why this may be or how to fix it. The new drive is formatted for OSX, journaled. Can you please help me? Just want my atv back. Thanks.

[nito]

I purchased a new 160 GB HD to replace my fried atv hd. It is listed as one of the compatible hd's on the awkward tv wiki (WD Scorpio Blue 1600). I downloaded atvdrive and for some reason, it won't see the new 160 GB drive that I have plugged in and mounted via a USB enclosure. I haven't been able to find anything on why this may be or how to fix it. The new drive is formatted for OSX, journaled. Can you please help me? Just want my atv back. Thanks.

open up the terminal "diskutil list" and paste whatever that returns.

[Sett]

Hello nito. I just registered to let you know that your application is amazing! It really made things extremely easy. Thank you for making this great piece of software.

[nito]

Hello nito. I just registered to let you know that your application is amazing! It really made things extremely easy. Thank you for making this great piece of software.

no problem glad you find it useful

[Sett]

I guess I spoke too soon. I'm having some trouble if you can please help me out.

I had the appletv working great. XBMC perfect. I started Boxee when something went wrong and I pulled the power plug. I restarted the appletv and text kept scrolling through the screen. This might be something to do with atvusb-creator. So I decide to erase everything and reinstall OS 1.0 since it was so easy the first time.

My problem is that now I keep getting a question mark after doing a restore. I'm doing everything I did exactly before. What can I be doing wrong? These are my steps:

-ATV 40GB (1.0) hard drive connected to my Mac (10.6.3)
-Using Disk Utility I erase completely leaving a blank journaled HDD
-I put an OS.dmg (1.0) into the support folder (I erased the other recovery files after the first restore failure, thinking a new OS.dmg might help)
-I run your application atvDrive 1.2(3) on the blank drive
-Run terminal code -

Code: Select all

dd if=/dev/diskxs2 of=~/Library/Application\ Support/atvDrive/recovery.dmg

with the x properly replaced
-Power on then try to restore....question mark?

I think this has something to do with my recovery partition. I'm close but I'm missing something. Please help?

[nito]

I guess I spoke too soon. I'm having some trouble if you can please help me out.

I had the appletv working great. XBMC perfect. I started Boxee when something went wrong and I pulled the power plug. I restarted the appletv and text kept scrolling through the screen. This might be something to do with atvusb-creator. So I decide to erase everything and reinstall OS 1.0 since it was so easy the first time.

My problem is that now I keep getting a question mark after doing a restore. I'm doing everything I did exactly before. What can I be doing wrong? These are my steps:

-ATV 40GB (1.0) hard drive connected to my Mac (10.6.3)
-Using Disk Utility I erase completely leaving a blank journaled HDD
-I put an OS.dmg (1.0) into the support folder (I erased the other recovery files after the first restore failure, thinking a new OS.dmg might help)
-I run your application atvDrive 1.2(3) on the blank drive
-Run terminal code -

Code: Select all

dd if=/dev/diskxs2 of=~/Library/Application\ Support/atvDrive/recovery.dmg

with the x properly replaced
-Power on then try to restore....question mark?

I think this has something to do with my recovery partition. I'm close but I'm missing something. Please help?

so after you do recovery you get a question mark? or when you try to boot to recovery you get a question mark? It's been a little while since i played with this and i actually got to a point where my appletv was getting question marks a lot- it's a bit of a finicky process. im curious, why did you use atvDrive if you didn't upgrade to a larger hard drive?