[Crabhammer]

I did the esata mod recently, swapping my atv internal hard drive with an 32GB eSata SSD. Crystalbuntu boots, but there are a a couple of issues I can't figure out how to correct.

First, my boot time is insanely long. I get this error a number of times before it finally seems to give up and just boot:

ata1: link is slow to respond, please be patient (ready=0)
ata1: device not ready (errno=-16), forcing hardreset
ata1: soft resetting link
ata1.00: configured for UDMA/100
ata1.00: device reported invalid CHS sector 0
ata1: EH complete

ata1: link is slow to respond, please be patient (ready=0)
ata1: SRST failed (errno=-16)

I've been trying to figure out what's going on there, but I'm coming up blank. One theory seems to point to the kernel trying to load a sata device even though the motherboard doesn't support it, and eventually it just times out.

The second (and more irritating) problem is that occasionally XBMC locks up completely. The shell spits something out about an "IO error." It happens both during playback and in the menu. I wish I had the exact text but I can't seem to reproduce the problem right now. I'm not sure if this is related to my first issue, but it would make sense.

Thanks, hopefully someone knows what's going on. Google doesn't, so right now I'm pretty screwed

[Hannes The Hun]

might be best to contact the project maintainer at http://www.stmlabs.com/projects/crystalhd-for-appletv/

[Crabhammer]

I posted there a little bit before I posted here, but no luck yet. Just trying everywhere I can to see if anyone has had the same issue. I know other people have attached eSata drives to their apple tvs, so I'm assuming that the same issue existed for them.

[Crabhammer]

One more thing I noticed today was that the apple tv fails to restart/boot up seemingly at random. Sometimes it loads up to the atv bootloader logo and hangs indefinitely, sometimes it just stays on a blank screen (no blinking ? mark, just black), and sometimes it starts up with no problems (except the aforementioned lengthy boot time.) I tried to use a separate bootloader on a USB stick to see if that would help, but the same issue persists. Sometimes it's able to kexec jump to my external, sometimes it just doesn't. There's not really any relevant error output, it just stops, generally sometime shortly following the line "boot=patchstick."

I know there's nothing wrong with my Crystalbuntu image because it boots effortlessly when I plug the enclosure in via USB instead of eSata. Even though that's sort of a solution in itself, I'd really like to get to the bottom of this. I already have the parts (44pin/40pin connector,female/female IDE cable, pata/sata bridge) so I might as well use them.