Warranty-Safe Apple TV OS Mods?

[mrwheat]

It seems like all the pieces are here for warranty-safe upgrades to the Apple TV OS. I.e., no case cracking required.

The problem of booting off an external USB drive is solved: http://wiki.awkwardtv.org/wiki/index.php?title=USB#Boot_from_USB_drive

And the problem of booting normal Mac OS X on an Apple TV is solved: http://www.hackint0sh.org/forum/showthread.php?t=541

So shouldn't it now be possible to create a drive image for an external USB drive that boots an Apple TV, modfies the appropriate files and settings on the internal drive, and enables ARD, ssh, and missing codecs without requiring the case to be opened?

It's likely a problematic exercise to create the appropriate partitions, etc. on the external drive, but this seems like the most valuable hack of all. Instructions on how to do this would greatly expand the audience of people interested in modding their Apple TV.

Anyone know if there are significant technical barriers to doing this? (It seems like everyone got sidetracked on getting OS X to boot on Apple TV and has lost interest in this avenue.... I, for one, don't want to crack open the case just yet :p )

[semthex]

Well from the word modding or modifiying it makes it hard to find anything what will not void your warranty on the device.
Proberly the only one not voiding it are those utilizing somehow external media conencted to USB. As son you open the magic box, warrenty is gone.

The onyl way is realyl booting external, which you mentioned, but well, I think it is not that bad to void the warrenty for the fun of it.

[mrwheat]

Well from the word modding or modifiying it makes it hard to find anything what will not void your warranty on the device.
Proberly the only one not voiding it are those utilizing somehow external media conencted to USB. As son you open the magic box, warrenty is gone.
Poor word choice on my part. The rest of the post is about how to turn on ARD and/or SSH without opening the case.

Having shell access enabled via a boot from an external drive seems very possible, but there's a chicken and egg problem for people who haven't yet opened the case on their Apple TVs.

For the sake of discussion, let's assume there are a LARGE number of people that prefer a more elegant solution than disassembling their new box. The desired result of having shell access seems to be achievable using some combination of an Apple TV compatible OS X install and booting from an external USB device. This would be a high priority item, IMO.

Has anyone tried this? Is anyone willing to try it? I'm more than happy to work on the problem but am missing key components (i.e., properly partitioned USB drive and Intel OS X and modifications for booting Apple TV). I assume someone else must already have the necessary pieces and knowledge to try this :)

[semthex]

Ok, what I think is possible is:

- ssh in
- scp a osx .dmg over*
- use diskutil resizeVolume to part Media in 2 parts
- restore .dmg over to the new parition
- scp over new kernel and replace
- copy over boot.efi from OSBoot to the new Partition
- bless it

done :)

* image of a installed OSX

I hope this helps.

[DsurioN]

seems someone has already started some work on this:

http://phoem.com/appletv-without-open.html

apparently it's not totally functional yet, but it looks like it's going in the right direction.

[GoodOmens]

seems someone has already started some work on this:

http://phoem.com/appletv-without-open.html

apparently it's not totally functional yet, but it looks like it's going in the right direction.


Neat thanks for the link. Hope he succeeds^^

[mk500]

I think the main problem right now is that we still haven't been able to reliably reproduce boot off USB. Hopefully we will figure this out eventually, but that is a pretty big roadblock.

[JaS]

Ok, what I think is possible is:

- ssh in
- scp a osx .dmg over*
- use diskutil resizeVolume to part Media in 2 parts
- restore .dmg over to the new parition
- scp over new kernel and replace
- copy over boot.efi from OSBoot to the new Partition
- bless it

done :)

* image of a installed OSX

I hope this helps.

This sounds about right, Has anyone tried it yet ?

[barbro66]

No - I've tried booting off a usb with the patched kernel which sees USB devices and gets around the whitelist, but no go. It fails to init the usb disk "family specific matching fails", and so can't load os.dmg to continue the boot.

So we need to boot with a kernel that will see the usb drive. First step is getting the kexts that are needed to see usb mass storage and go from there.

-B

[GoodOmens]

No - I've tried booting off a usb with the patched kernel which sees USB devices and gets around the whitelist, but no go. It fails to init the usb disk "family specific matching fails", and so can't load os.dmg to continue the boot.

So we need to boot with a kernel that will see the usb drive. First step is getting the kexts that are needed to see usb mass storage and go from there.

-B

Are you saying patched kernel inside the atv or on the thumb drive?

[barbro66]

Sorry - a patched kernel on the external usb drive. I think when you hold menu/down on the remote it boots off the external drive, whatever blessed efi file is set up. So some possibilities are:

- boot off an external hacked OSX install (trying this now)

possibly it only boots off the recover partion so i'll try changing the com.apple.boot... so that it boots from rd=disk0s4, where we then put the OSX install

lastly if that doesn't work i'll try to change the size of the recovery partition and then copy OSX over to there

Any help/comments appreciated...

[mrwheat]

So we need to boot with a kernel that will see the usb drive. First step is getting the kexts that are needed to see usb mass storage and go from there.
This is a problem (of course) with normal OS X. Apple has disallowed USB booting since about 10.1. Are there existing kernel builds that allow USB booting for Darwin/OS X? Is that the missing piece?

[ptaylor874]

With Intel Macs you can boot from USB. I've installed 10.4.8 on a USB drive (which boots just find on my iMac) and tried booting from it with my AppleTV, but besides a few flashes of the hard drive, it boots back up to a screen setting resolution, then with a menu to either restart, run diagnostics (my Apple TV is working normally, I'm happy to report) and finally to restore to factory installation..

[ptaylor874]

I can't tell that it really is even trying to do anything with the External drive beyond a few flashes... The only fully successful external boot that I've seen was with a cloned drive... In that example, they didn't try restoring the factory image because he wasn't sure if it would simply restore it to the external drive, or if it would restore to the internal, or just what...