Putting your ATV hard drive image on a CD

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I've figured out a way to compress a 40 gig ATV disk image down to 444 mb, small enough to fit on a CD. Here's what I did.

1. Do a factory restore of the Apple TV. This deletes all the content on the hard drive. Unplug the ATV and pull its hard drive.

2. Connect the hard drive to a Mac by any number of means. I use a universal drive adapter that connects the drive by USB. Two partitions should mount: OSBoot and Media.

3. Launch Disk Utility. Click on the OSBoot partition and erase the free space using the one-pass zero write. This puts a zero on every unused byte of the partion. For OSBoot, it'll only take a couple of minutes. Next, do the same with Media partition. This will take about 30 minutes. At this point, all the unused bytes are now zeros.

4. Use the dd command in terminal to image your ATV's disk to your computer's internal hard drive. You'll need 38 gigs of free space (or about 150 gigs if you have a 160 gig ATV drive). The directions for this can be found here. A 40 gig drive takes about 2 hours by USB. A bit faster if it's Firewire.

5. If you don't already have Stuffit, download it and use it to compress the ATV drive image. Since you made all of the unused space on the hard drive zeros, Stuffit will be able to compress it about 90% (40 gigs down to 450 megs). This took about 2 hours on my 1.66 core duo mini.

6. When you need it, simply unstuff it (make sure you have 40 gigs of hard drive space available!). It took about half an hour to unstuff on my machine and the last 15 minutes I had the spinning ball. Just let it run.

7. You can now use dd to put it back to a hard drive. If you put it on a drive larger than 40 gigs, you can use iPartition to increase Media's size to the hard drive you put the image on.

This will also work with a 160 gig ATV, but it'll take longer to zero the Media partition, read the drive for imaging, and to compress/decompress it. However, I suspect you could still put the compressed image on a CD.