A few months ago, there was a video in circulation of what appeared to be a successful hack for Apple TV. The video in question detailed what appeared to be Apple TV booting up from an external hard drive.

We'll be following up on that hack with this similarly reported attempt done by AppleTVHacks.net and FatWallet. This newly released patch will enable Apple TV to boot up from its internal hard drive, while using an external USB (hard) drive as its main storage unit.

We imagine owners trying to get more space out of their Apple TV will find this patch most useful. For the guys wondering how to pull this off, here's what you'll need:

• An ssh-enabled Apple TV.
• An Intel-Mac or Intel-based *nix.
• An installed version of Mac OS X 10.4 Intel. Or a full copy of the contents of the Â?/System/Library/ExtensionsÂ? folder from one.
• An original, unmodified copy of the Â?mach_kernel.prelinkÂ? file from the Apple TV.
• An external USB drive formatted using Â?Journaled HFS+Â?.
  

Full installation details are available at the read link. As a further backgrounder for this patch, the original creator was actually Patrick Walton of the University of Chicago. Patrick wrote the original patch, while AppleTVHacks further fine-tuned it after they encountered a syncing problem. Just be reminded that thus patch has been designed to work on Apple TV software v1.0 - it might not work on v1.1.