Creating an HFS+ Partition from the AppleTV/OS-X Command Line
I just got a new 1 Terabyte hard-drive to use as an external USB drive with my AppeTV. Unfortunately, I don't have a Mac with which to partition this drive with HFS+ - the Mac file system. But it's straight-forward to do this on the AppleTV itself using the following command-line steps. The below was performed on an AppleTV 2.1 after having run nitoTV's Smart Installer. I assume the following would work on a real Mac too.
- Plug the new HD in to your AppleTV's USB port and login via SSH.
- The first step is to identify which disk it is you want to partition. You can do this by running the following command:
ls -al /dev/disk*
You should see some output like this:brw-r----- 1 root operator 14, 0 Nov 23 16:08 /dev/disk0
As you can see, disk0 has 4 partitions. This is the internal AppleTV drive. disk1 has no partitions, which means it's your new unpartitioned drive.
brw-r----- 1 root operator 14, 1 Nov 23 16:08 /dev/disk0s1
brw-r----- 1 root operator 14, 2 Nov 23 16:08 /dev/disk0s2
brw-r----- 1 root operator 14, 3 Nov 23 16:08 /dev/disk0s3
brw-r----- 1 root operator 14, 4 Nov 23 16:08 /dev/disk0s4
brw-r----- 1 frontrow operator 14, 5 Nov 23 16:08 /dev/disk1 - Now run the following to partition this disk:
sudo diskutil partitionDisk /dev/disk1 1 HFS+ MyDrive 1000gb
Where 'MyDrive' is the name of your new partition and '1000gb' is the size. This should give output something like this:Started partitioning on disk disk1
As you can see, the resulting partition is not 1000gb but 931.5gb - so it appears diskutil is forgiving enough to just create the biggest partition it can if you over-spec the size a little bit.
Creating Partition Map
5% ..Formatting Disk
100% ..
Finished partitioning on disk disk1
/dev/disk1
#: type name size identifier
0: GUID_partition_scheme *931.5 GB disk1
1: EFI 34.0 MB disk1s1
2: Apple_HFS MyDrive 931.5 GB disk1s2
That's it! Remember before you unplug the drive, it's always a good idea to cleanly unmount:
sudo umount /Volumes/WD_1TB/
Also, if you're planning on plugging the drive into a linux machine, you'll need to disable journaling first:
diskutil disableJournal /Volumes/WD_1TB/
You can re-enable it later by running:
diskutil disableJournal /Volumes/WD_1TB/
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Are you getting a lot of use out of your AppleTV? I considering whether to buy one for my wife.
Comment by brian [Visitor] — 12/04/08 @ 10:28
It's a nice device, small, quiet, pretty easy to use. But it has some limitations. For me the annoying ones are only 256MB RAM (non-upgradable as it's soldered to the motherboard) which limits how many services I can load on to it, and limited power - a lot of 720p high-definition video I want to play on it has to be re-encoded to sit within Apple's constraints on video bitrate and h.264 codec features, otherwise the AppleTV won't play it. It's a bit of fun, but sometimes I think a custom built HTPC might be a better way to go.
Comment by lars [Member] — 12/08/08 @ 02:10