[Shield Android TV General] hallydamaster:
DD for Windows part

Guide for Windows, using dd for Windows by John Newbigin

Download the dd utility from: http://www.chrysocome.net//dd

[SIZE="4"]
[COLOR="Red"]
WARNING! Using DD for Windows from a command prompt with administrator privileges is DANGEROUS!
If you specify your Windows drive as output file/device, it WILL destroy the partition!
[/COLOR]
[/SIZE]

[B][I][COLOR="Red"][SIZE="3"]I am not responsible for bricked devices, dead HDDs, animals
activist campaigns, or any H/W damage caused by you following these
directions. YOU are choosing to make these modificiations, and
you, yourself take responsibility for doing these modifications
to your device.
You can do serious H/W damage to your SATV or even your computer
by doing any of this. So, you have been warned! [/SIZE][/COLOR][/I][/B]

So, I used a Windows 10 Pro environment to test this. I think any Windows version based on the NT architecture will be working.

Extract the dd.exe and as the path you want to extract to, use this: "%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\WindowsApps"

This gives you the ability to use DD system wide.

Plug in the HDD from your SATV. The disk will be unreadable to Windows as it has no known filesystem. Windows might pop up asking you to format the drive. You MUST ignore that, and press cancel!

Open up a command prompt with administrator privileges. You can do this with Windows key+X to bring up a menu, then choose Command Prompt (administrator).

Navigate to a folder where you want to work from. It doesn't matter where, as you just have to have space enough to store the bin files.

If you need a refreshment in navigating the commnd prompt, you can read up on it here:

http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=1723&page=3

Now, run the command

dd --list

This gives you a lot of information. It even gives you the total byte count of your harddisk drives.

Navigate a little up to locate the right disk:

[IMG="Navigate to right disk"]https://i.imgsafe.org/ef7625c822.png[/IMG]

In this example I didn't use my SATV HDD, but another 750GB HDD I had lying around. The SATV SSHD will have a size of 500107862016 bytes.

Be careful that you choose the right drive to work on, and you also have to find the one that has the device string "\\?\Device\HarddiskX\Partition0".

And X will have to be equivalent to the harddisk number that Windows has assigned to your device.

The you continue by dumping the first 6899870 blocks of data to a bin file:

dd if=\\?\Device\Harddisk[B]X[/B]\Partition0 of=firstpart.bin count=6899870

This will give you a raw image file of all the partitions up until the /data partition which is better left out (it will come later).

Then continue by dumping the last 5120 bytes of data which contains the partition array and the GPT header:

dd if=\\?\Device\Harddisk[B]X[/B]\Partition0 of=lastpart.bin skip=976773158 bs=512

You can now disconnect your HDD. These 2 files also counts as a backup of your SATV (not with user settings, data partition was not copied).

Now connect your new SSD in the enclosure. Use dd --list again to determine the right disk to use, and please be careful not to mix up your Windows drive or another drive which contains important data.

You can easily start by writing the firstpart.bin:

dd if=firstpart.bin of=\\?\Device\Harddisk[B]X[/B]\Partition0

Please continue the rest of the guide in first post.