Updating a jailbroken ATV2 to iOS 5

I recently updated my ATV2 to iOS 5 (w/ tethered jailbreak, - tethered meaning you need to connect the ATV2 to your computer each time to re-power or else the ATV2 won't boot-up).  Updating is easy as cheese if it's not jailbroken, but since mine was the experience definitely brings to mind the saying "if it works, don't touch it".  The good news it that it eventually worked!

So why did I touch it?  I learned about the new AirPlay feature on the iPhone 4s, after a visit to the Apple store, and wanted to try this out.  Unfortunately, my jailbroken ATV2 was stuck at iOS 4, which doesn't support this new feature.

So here's how it went:

First I followed this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dX1bsSL9bUw, which I found on the wiki.xbmc.org site.  Unfortunately, each attempt to use SeasOnPass to re-jailbreak the ATV2 resulted in an error from iTunes (error 21) and the jailbreak ultimately failing, leaving the ATV2 in a useless state.

Google searches for the error 21 come up with suggestions like: try a different cable, try again (and again, and again), restart computer, first make sure a standard restore works from iTunes.

Unfortunately a standard restore through iTunes always resulted in the same error.  And no luck with several re-tries or restarts.  Great, did I brick my ATV2?  With each re-try I have to restart SeasOnPass, which for some reason takes 5+ minutes to load, so I gave up for now...

Well, as it turns out, re-try (again and again) was the answer.  Came back a week later and tried again (may have used a different USB port) and it worked the first try when using SeasOnPass.

From here on, things went relatively smoothly.  Here are the basics steps after getting SeasOnPass loaded.

1. Used the NitoTV installer downloaded from here: http://i0sen.dyndns.org/jailbreak-Tools.html
2. Under ATV2 settings, set sleep to NEVER.
3.  Followed instruction at XBMC to install latest unofficial Eden version for iOS 5 as given in this post: http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=127369
4. Re-load backed-up XBMC folder (assuming you followed the YouTube instructions)

 I haven't actually tried step 4 yet, but I'll find out soon how it goes.

Hope this helps somebody.

"...original item for "Shares" cannot be found." when sharing PC to Mac

I tried to share an external drive from my WinXP box to a Mac (MBP) and always got the following error:

"The operation cannot be completed because the original item for "Shares" cannot be found."

Searches on Google came up with plenty of solutions for this error, but none of which worked in my case.  So in case it helps somebody in the future, here's how I resolved it.

A little investigation revealed that I could share other folders and access them fine from the MBP, just not the external drive.  I eventually figured out that I just couldn't share things that were large.  Since my external drive was 500 GB, it easily fell into this category.

This size restraint on sharing was fixed by following instructions here:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/106167

Basically, there's some parameter (on the WinXP machine) you have to adjust to allow larger things to be shared.  The parameter is adjusted/added using regedit.  I changed it to the max value of 0xC (12), and that worked fine.