AppleTV is sad….
Our AppleTV started having ‘issues’ about a month ago. It was locking up, needing to be rebooted way more often then normal. (Instead of once every 6-9 months, once every 4-5 days) It was also starting to show sparkles when playing back certain shows and generally just not being happy. On Thursday I told it to-do a factory restore, which basically is suppose to flatten the drive and re-load the factory image from its spare partition. Well that REALLY pissed it off, because it wouldn’t even boot all the way back into the normal mode after that.
I sort of was thinking the drive was going bad at this point, which should be straight forward to fix. But now I’m just a little confused. I pulled the box apart last night and removed the drive. After attaching it to the adapter cable I bought when I upgrade the drive from the original 40G to the 230G, I ran it through all the normal disk checking steps. This is where things didn’t go so well, rather then finding some bad it just said everything was OK.
So I started at the beginning, laid down the original image I saved when I did the disk upgrade last year. Put everything back together and hooked it back up. But that didn’t work so well, it would boot into the diagnostic mode, but otherwise wouldn’t go any further. I pulled the drive out again, re-did everything in case I missed up a step and go the same results.
I just snapped another image from the original drive. (Little surprise I found it so easily) Then put the original drive in the box to see if it would work. Of course it was totally fine, booted up normal and happy started playing stuff which was on it last year before going into storage. I’m not laying the ‘new’ image down on the big drive and will try everything again. If that doesn’t work I guess I’ll just replace the drive. Can you even fine 2.5 inch ATA laptop drives now?