PartitioningPatchstick

Partition for a Patchstick

A basic patchstick serves one function and that is to enable remote ssh access into the AppleTV. To do this, a patchstick must be bootable and be able to mount and copy various sshd required files into the OSBoot file structure.

So first things first, let's make a bootable pen drive. This assumes that you have looked over the partition for Linux section to understand the basics. You will need to build the patched parted and the hfs support tools.

This assumes the pen drive is at "/dev/sda". We are just going to make the recovery partition and a second to hold the patchstick script and sshd support files. The second partition could be ext2, ext3 or hfsplus. Fat is not supported at the current time as darwin/linux permissions do not translate correctly.

Wipe the pen drive

# zero /dev/sda first or pre-existing guid will not change
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=4096 count=1M

Create the gpt partition on the pen drive

# create initial gpt structures
sudo parted -s /dev/sda mklabel gpt

Create the recovery partition

# create a 25MB "Recovery" partition  (starting at sector 40 is important)
sudo parted -s /dev/sda mkpart primary HFS 40s 25M
sudo parted -s /dev/sda set 1 atvrecv on

Create the "patchstick" partition

# create a 100MB "patchstick" partition
sudo parted -s /dev/sda mkpart primary HFS 25M 125M

Verify the partitions

# verify the partitions
sudo parted /dev/sda
print

You should see something similar (note the atvrecv flag)

Model: IC25N020 ATDA04-0 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 256.0MB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt

Number  Start   End     Size    File system  Name     Flags  
 1      20.5kB  25.0MB  25.0MB               primary  atvrecv   
 2      25.0MB  125.0MB 100.0MB              primary 

Format the created partitions

sudo mkfs.hfsplus -v Recovery /dev/sda1
sudo mkfs.hfsplus -v Patchstick /dev/sda2
sync 

Done