How to fix an upsized Apple TV stuck in 1.0 software

Some months ago, I swapped some hard drives, and ended up upgrading my Apple TV’s 40GB hard drive. The process was the standard procedure you can find in many sites: back-up the drive, create the correct partition map on the new drive and restore the data into the new drive.

When I upgraded the hard drive, the software version was already 2.x. However, the Apple TV restore partition was still the original 1.0. Here is where the problem started. Whenever new software upgrades were downloaded, they just failed. I’m not sure the upgrades check the hard disk size. Most likely, when restoring into the larger hard drive, some permissions got messed up. A “factory restore” takes the Apple TV back to 1.0 (no YouTube, no Apple Store menus) but once again the upgrades fail.

The process I document here doesn’t require to re-open the Apple TV case. You could go that route, of course, but I think it may even take longer.

You will need:

• External USB drive that can be completely wiped (512MB or more)
• A copy of ATV USB Creator
• A DMG from Apple with the latest firmware. At the time of writing 2Z694-5573-24.dmg. I believe ATV USB Creator tries to download it automatically. However, we’ll need the file for the extra step described here, so you’d be better off by getting the DMG yourself.

UPDATE: You can try http://mesu.apple.com/data/OS/061-5816.20090224.At23V/2Z694-5587-18.dmg for 2.3.1 firmware. A good place to look for the URL of the latest firmware is http://www.iclarified.com/entry/comments.php?page=2&enid=970

In a nutshell, you need to replace a file OS.dmg on the restore partition of the Apple TV with the one you just downloaded from Apple.

That could be easily done connecting the ATV HD to you OS X box, or even to a Linux box that knows how to read GPT partitions and HFS+ filesystems. In my case, I didn’t want to disconnect the Apple TV from the living room setup, open it, etc.

Follow the instructions at http://code.google.com/p/atvusb-creator/ – run the application (atvusb-creator-1.0.b10 at the time of writing) and create the “patchstick” USB drive.

Creating the patchstick

The contents of the patchstick will look like the following, image taken from the ATV USB Creator site

Now, this patchstick assumes you have 2.x software on your Apple TV and will fail with a 1.0 software. We’ll do some changes BEFORE connecting it to the Apple TV

The first 20 lines of the file patchstick.sh are shown below.

001 #!/bin/bash
002
003 exec 2>/dev/console
004 exec 1>/dev/console
005
006 echo
007 echo "        --- AppleTV Patchstick by ATVUSB-Creator ---"
008
009 echo "       * mounting OSBoot partition"
010 echo "       * mounting OSBoot partition"
011 mkdir -p /OSBoot
012 fsck.hfsplus -f /dev/sda3
013 mount -t hfsplus -o rw,force /dev/sda3 /OSBoot
014 sleep 1
015
016 # if we successfully mount /OSBoot
017 if [ -d "/OSBoot/dev" ]; then
018   # symlink /mnt/rootfs to /payloads to make the scripts easier to read
019   echo "       * symlinking /mnt/rootfs -> /payloads"
020   ln -s /mnt/rootfs/payloads /payloads

You’ll edit this script and make it copy the file 2Z694-5573-24.dmg into your recovery partition.
Lines 12 to 23 below are your edits. Lines 010-011 are there just to give you a reference of where to edit. Line 024-025 are again just for reference and correspond to former lines 012-013. That part of the script will fail, anyway. If you feel adventurous, just delete from line 24 onwards.

010 echo "       * mounting OSBoot partition"
011 mkdir -p /OSBoot
012 fsck.hfsplus -f /dev/sda2
013 mount -t hfsplus -o rw,force /dev/sda2 /OSBoot
014 sleep 1
015
016 # if we successfully mount /OSBoot
017 if [ -f "/OSBoot/OS.dmg" ]; then
018   echo "       * updating restore partition"
019   cp -f /mnt/rootfs/2Z694-5573-24.dmg /OSBoot/OS.dmg
020   umount /OSBoot
021 else
022   echo "       * error updating restore partition"
023 fi
024 fsck.hfsplus -f /dev/sda3
025 mount -t hfsplus -o rw,force /dev/sda3 /OSBoot

Note that line 012 looks very similar, but uses sda2 instead of sda3. This is partition 2 of the Apple TV, where the recovery image of the filesystem is stored in the file OS.dmg. On line 19, you should replace 2Z694-5573-24.dmg with whatever the name of the file you plan to use.

As usual, YMMV, you must know what you are doing if you want to edit scripts on your AppleTV, as a typo, or any other error may render it unusable. By following this advice, you explicitly discharge me of any liability with respect to any of your equipment.

Before disconnecting your patchstick from the Mac, copy the 2Z694-5573-24.dmg (i.e. the file you downloaded from Apple) to the root of the patchstick file system. Dismount it, power off your ATV (unplug it), plug the patchstick on the USB port of the ATV, and power on. You should an AppleTV with Tux logo (as in the image above), then “—- AppleTV Patchstick by ATVUSB-Creator —-“, etc.

Wait for a couple of minutes, then power off the ATV, remove the patchstick, power on again. If you did not fry your ATV, it should boot to the same old 1.0 menu

Now go to settings, factory restore. It will reboot the ATV, and after a few minutes, you should see the welcome screen and language selection. If you go to settings, software version, it should be now 2.3. If it does, congratulations. You have updated your firmware and even if your updates were not broken, like mine, you can now do factory restores without having to re-download the upgrades every time.

I welcome comments, improvements or questions.