[coolspot18]

Hi all,

Just a question regarding Factory Restore on the ATV - if I seriously mess up the disk, will a factory restore reinstall everything on the ATV's main hard drive? Does it essentially redownload the disk image from Apple's servers and reinstall it on disk?

Thanks.

[Jimmer]

Hi all,

Just a question regarding Factory Restore on the ATV - if I seriously mess up the disk, will a factory restore reinstall everything on the ATV's main hard drive? Does it essentially redownload the disk image from Apple's servers and reinstall it on disk?

Thanks.

There's a hidden partition that contains a snap shot of a pristene factory install. Unless you've mounted and messed around with this partition, then you should always be able to restore your ATV and start from scratch. I've f-ed mine up more times than I've had hot dinners and I've always been able to pull mine back out of the fire.

What exactley did you do to it?

Jim

[TeknoJnky]

the factory restore works from a recovery partition that rebuilds the os partition and leaves the media partition alone.

there is no downloading done by the restore, although after being restored the new os install will update itself if you let it.

if you have a hardware drive failure or otherwise mess up the recovery partition, then you won't be able to recover via the factory restore, but its possible via the atv patchstick to reformat and recreate the recovery partition (google atv patchstick os recovery etc).

[davilla]

Little know secret, if you mess up the Media partition too badly, then even a restore will not fix things as factory restore assumes that Media is always good. You get into an endless cycle of factory restores.

The fix is to delete everything (delete, not re-partition) on Media, then when doing a factory restore, the recovery boot will re-populate Media with the proper bits and life will be good again.

[Tanagramgd]

I had atv 1 with software 3.02 and XBMC Darma running, the menus where running slow in XBMC and I could not connect to shares. I figured a factory reset would do the trick. I did not uninstall XBMC.

After the restart of ATV, into the older style menu, I'm see the apple logo, and then the blue clap board movie icon and the old style menu. And this just loops. How do I get the factory restore to "take" or how do I get this to stop, so that I can upgrade the ATV software and upgrade eventually to XBMC Eden?

[Tanagramgd]

Actually, here's what I can do:
Select English-
Get to the apple tv recovery screen.
Restart: Gets me to the same place.
Run Diagnostics: Says my machine is fine.
Factory Restore: Pick my network and enter my password, it plays the startup video, and then it wants my to "connect to itunes" and will show me the pairing numbers for this task over and over. Not long enough to write them down or perform the task.

Upon pressing "menu" this stops and the ATV / Apple Logo loop begins.

Should be noted that I Quit all itunes on my network, and this "pairing" loop eventually stopped. Then I hit menu and it did let me into the settings menu to update the software. Let's see where this goes.