How to Change the HD of an Apple TV

We finally received our Apple TV yesterday, and we immediately decided to change its HD. Hereafter is the procedure to perform this operation.

First, flip the unit upside down, then remove (or should we say peal?) the latex-based foam covering the surface.

Once the foam is removed, you will spot 8 Torx-type screws. Remove the screws indicated by the red arrows, you should get 2 long ones (from the front side) and 2 shorter ones. The screws pointed by the blue arrows maintain the HD, so do not remove them before having entirely opened the case.

Open the case of the Apple TV carefully, then unplug the HD ribbon cord from the motherboard. Then you can remove the 4 blue arrows screws and disassemble the HD from the case.

We exchange the original 40GB Fujitsu HD by a 120GB Fujitsu HD, as they are known being rather silent while releasing much less heat than other HD. Of course, such HDs are not exhibiting high performance level, but in the Apple TV it is not really a key factor, and in addition they are not expensive (79€ from our partner Macway). If you wish to have a larger storage space, you can install any 2.5" HD.
Then, install the original HD in an USB2 or FireWire external case, then connect it to a Mac Intel (we do not know if one could perform the following operation on a PPC-based Mac).
From that point, you will have to use the Terminal, so launch it. We used part of the instruction from a tutorial published by appletvhacks.net/
Enter the following command diskutil list then execute it.
It will indicate the path of your Apple TV HD, so for us it was /dev/disk1

Then, enter the following command, and replace /dev/disk1 by the path you obtained, and "Lionel" by your user name then execute the command and be patient:
dd if=/dev/disk1 of=/Users/lionel/AppleTVDrive-Compressed.img bs=1024k
For information, with a MacBook connected via FireWire to the Apple TV HD, it took about one hour to create the image of the original 37.26GB. Once the operation is completed, you should have a disk image file of 37.6GB entitled "AppleTVDrive-Compressed.img" and located at the root level in your user account.

You can now store in a clean and safe place the original Apple TV HD.
Then, install the new HD in your external case, and execute the following command diskutil list to identify the path.
Then, enter the following command, and replace /dev/disk1 by the path you obtained, and "Lionel" by your user name then execute it:
dd if=/Users/lionel/AppleTVDrive-Compressed.img of=/dev/disk1 bs=1024k
Be patient, it should not be faster than the first step.
Then, one will need to change the size of the partition currently defined to 32GB; as a manufacturing reset is NOT efficient to modify the partition scheme.
We used iPartition, a powerful and easy to use application; try to use it regularly as it has a price: 41€.

Modifying the partition scheme takes couple of seconds, then your new HD is ready to be installed in the Apple TV, and the latter to be finally connected to you TV.

As shown by this capture, it is now done and working perfectly.
If you plan to change the HD, then do it immediately as all modifications or setting will be lost.