I think there are many people accidentally delete or format theirTV hard drive (like I did). Obviously we need to buy a new hard drive or restore damaged hard drive to the functional state. There are many thread regarding this subject on over internet, but I think my method is simplest and easiest. Here is what I did.
1. Get the latest TV image from link below
2. Connect your hard drive to your Mac.
3. Open the Disk Utility application. You should see new firmware that you just downloaded and TV and see your new connected hard drive.
4. Click on your new hard drive and go to restore tab.
5. Drag firmware to the ‘source’ field and new hard drive to the ‘destination’ field, as in picture below.
6. Click on restore and you’re done.
PS. This method is working on my machine which I spent less than 10 minutes for the whole process. However, there is no ‘recovery’ partition created on this method (which is not important since everything on my AppleTV take 2.0.2 is working fine)
#1 by Pavel on August 25th, 2008
Thanks. Good idea. I’ll become your constant reader and subscribe on RSS.
#2 by Exidor on December 14th, 2008
Doesn’t work for me. Disk Utility won’t allow me to choose my AppleTV disk as the destination.
#3 by Admin on December 14th, 2008
Your AppleTV hard-drive need to be formatted in order to be restored. After formatting, you can select your drive as a destination.
#4 by Manolo on December 14th, 2008
I did yesterday and it is good.I no formatted the disk only do all the steep and in destination put os of my disk atv
Thank for your tutorial
Soory for my inglish i write from Spain
#5 by Zeus on January 27th, 2009
I wasn’t able to get this to work, and the picture you have isn’t there anymore. Could you update this with a little more detail? I’ve tried formatting the drive and then restoring the image with no luck. aTV just keeps rebooting with apple logo. Thanks