Future Tech Systems

First of all I’d like to give credit where it’s due – to Jason Tomczak who has a wonderful article I used for a good portion of this particular repair job.  My purpose in this article was to document the process start to finish starting with taking the thing apart, as well as to share some humorous pitfalls I had in the process and how you can avoid them.  You can view the article in question here: http://jasontomczak.com/2007/11/23/4/.

I replaced a 250 GB SATA drive in the iMac that was failing with a Seagate Barracuda 1TB.  I had wanted to get a 500 GB Western Digital Caviar Black, but I had to go with what Best Buy had to offer.  My next project is going to be bumping the memory from 1 GB to 4 GB.  The upside of this project, aside from getting the computer working again (will mean more later in the article, trust me…) was getting a clean install of Snow Leopard on there.  My fiance has had Macs for a good long while, so there were 3 layers or so of upgrade on top of upgrade, with literally over 1 million files on the disk previously.

For ease of viewing, I have used full res photos.  I have also listed the sizes of the various Torx screws that are used, which I think will be helpful to you.

Anyhow, on with the article:

There are two sets of screws you need to remove first from the bottom.  There are four Torx T-7 screws along the bottom, and two Phillips #1 screws over the memory upgrade slot.

Once you have removed all six of these screws, you will have to try and “tuck in” the memory slot arms to be able to remove the cover.  If you pull from the bottom of the front cover, it should start to “flip up” towards where the web cam is at the top.

This is what you will see with the cover removed.  Note the fan in the lower left is choked with dust.  I would personally suggest hitting off the insides with some Dust Off spray.  Just make sure to keep the can upright, don’t shake it or turn it upside down, and use quick, short, targeted bursts.

As you begin to fold the cover upwards, you will see two wires attached to the webcam.  One wire you can just unplug (gently).  The other one is covered by that yellow tape.  Use the tip of a screwdriver or something to lift the tape so you don’t get your hand oils all over the tape, then you can still use it.  This connector is metal and a little tougher to get out, but be careful not to bend or break the connector on the way out.

Closeup shot of the filthy fan.  Note: electronics really dislike dust, because it is like a warm fuzzy blanket which traps heat.  Heat ruins things like hard drives.  Dust out your computer regularly!  If you have pets, regularly would be at least once or twice a year with an iMac, since its fairly well sealed, but at least every couple of months if you have a PC (which I do, that reminds me…)

Next we will begin to remove the display.  Surrounding the display are eight Torx T-8 screws.  You can lay the machine down flat and dump the screws out, but I chose to remove the screws with the iMac upright.  Personal preference, or you can use tweezers, etc.  Some use magnetized screwdrivers, but personally, I don’t think magnets and electronics mix and would rather fish screws out of the carpet.  Speaking of which, make sure you have a nice CLEAN work area.  This is important – its a lot easier to find the tiny screws you’ll inevitably drop if you have a nice wide open, clean desk, freshly vacuumed floor, etc.

Don’t take my word for it, but I believe this is grounding tape for dealing with static on the display.  There is some at the lower left and lower right of the display.  Peel it up carefully so hopefully you can reuse it – electrical tape has the exact opposite effect of grounding tape; it insulates rather than conducts.  The static reduction will make your display and your iMac in general attract a bit less dust.

After you have removed the tape and the screws, I recommend laying the unit down for this part.  The monitor has a plastic tab/strip at the top that is clear right above where “UP” is stamped into the metal frame.  This is so you can grab that strip and lift the display up.  It will come up from the top and almost “hinge” at the bottom.  LIFT IT UP VERY VERY CAREFULLY!  There are two important cables attached to the back, that are fairly delicate, and you don’t want to tear them out.  Jason opted to lean his display up against the base of the iMac.  I opted for the same method, but the display decided it would be more fun to fall over, rip itself out by the wires, and smash into my (padded) office chair before flopping onto the carpet.  I almost did this project on a wood table above wood floors, thank God I did it in my office instead!  Somehow, miraculously, the screen didn’t crack, the wires didn’t tear, and after putting the Mac back together, taking it back apart, reattaching the cables, and putting it back together again, the display is working.  These are the kinds of things that happen to your computer at a store that you never hear about.  I personally can’t resist sharing a near disaster with a happy ending.  Hey, nobody’s perfect… (except my bride to be )

Here is a shot of the hard drive.  One quick tip, which I wish I had noticed sooner.  You don’t have to take out the screws in the hard drive at this phase – that black plastic strip to the left of my Torx driver (Also T-8 size, you’ll need to take the screws out once the drive is out) presses in and pops out.  Make sure to disconnect the SATA cable and power cable before pulling the drive out, as well as the thermal sensor, pictured below:

You can’t see it in the picture, but on my particular drive the thermal sensor was over a cutout on the drive to where I was able to pop it off from behind.  I used a jeweler’s flathead screwdriver to pry it up, so I could re-use the adhesive on the back.  I don’t recommend using electrical tape.  Be careful – it’s a small circuit board so you don’t want to scrape/crack/break it.

Once you have removed the cables, thermal sensor, and black plastic bracket (Torx T-8 for both the screws in the bracket and these pegs), remove the mounting pegs and set them aside to install into your new drive.  Note the orientation of the drive – with the drive on its back, and the connectors on the right side, the pegs should be facing towards you.

This is the new hard drive complete with pegs and mounting bracket.  As mentioned before I chose a Seagate Barracuda 1 TB, 7200 RPM SATA drive.  At the time of this writing, I paid $99.99 retail, but should be $20 or so cheaper online.  I had no issue with this size as far as the OS or hardware was concerned.

Connect the cables, put the hard drive back in, and make sure the black plastic clip latches in.  Then put the thermal sensor back on in roughly the same spot.  I used the tool in the picture to press the thermal sensor on to kind of stick it down better, but however you get it back on there without damaging it is fine.

Reattach the two cables on the back of the display and stick them back down in their appropriate channels, etc.

Lay the unit down, and put the display back in, bottom first, taking care that the grounding tape at the bottom is folded out of the way, and put the eight Torx T-8 screws back in.  Once this is done, reattach the grounding tape.

Get your faceplate,  and in reverse of how it came off, reattach the two wires to the webcam.  Fold the faceplate back down, taking care not to tug on the wires.

Make sure to push these guys back in as you are attempting to close up.  Don’t want to break these for sure!

Put the four Torx T-7 screws and the two Phillips #1 screws back in on the memory door, and she’s back together!  Side note: Because of the display dropping incident, and having to take it apart again, I opted to bolt the display in partially with a couple of screws, and left the faceplate off, until I was sure things were working before putting the faceplate back in.

Time to fire it up!

Eureka!  She works.  Turn on the iMac, and put the Mac OS disk in the drive.  Hold down the letter “C” on your keyboard as soon as you hear the “BONG!” noise on startup.  When you see the twirly activity icon, you can let go.  Choose your language and continue.

Before you continue with the installation, you’ll need to partition the drive.  Open Disk Utility from the Utilities page on the install disk, and highlight the new drive.  Choose the third tab on the right, “Partition”, and create partition(s) as you wish.

After it’s partitioned and formatted, just install Mac OS and you’re done!  I went with Snow Leopard because I like excuses to upgrade things.  I hope you found this tutorial helpful.  My background is that of a PC Technician who grew up around both Macs and PCs, and my fiance is a graphic designer, and uses Macs at work and at home, so I’ve sort of had to learn as I go.

Stay tuned – in the next couple of days I will be posting a complete guide to replacing the hard drive of an Intel iMac 250GB with a brand new 500GB.  I plan on having proper screenshots, etc.  I will also be loading the new Snow Leopard on it with a clean install.  Rather than copying an image of the busted drive back on, we’re going with a clean install of Snow Leopard and just moving individual folders.  The reason for this is that this setup has been copied and re-copied as computers and operating systems get upgraded and replaced over the last 6 years or so, starting with Mac OS 9, and there is way too much unnecessary “stuff” on there.

Sometimes a clean install of an operating system, whether Windows or Mac OSX, can be like having a new computer again.

So after roughly 72 hours of running, DiskWarrior finally finished with the disk!  Now I have selected all the files it was able to recover, and in the left hand side of the screen chose the external USB hard drive I bought for this purpose, and am copying over all of the data it’s able to now.

Hey folks – Chris the owner here.

My Fiance’s iMac decided that it wanted to stop working this weekend.  Now, keep in mind, I am primarily a Windows/PC technician, but I am not your typical “Everybody should own a PC and not a Mac” type person.  There are people who like Macs, and people who like PCs, and there are pluses and minuses to both.  That being said, we have had this particular iMac for 3 years almost.  It was a Christmas gift for her.  On December 26th, the original hard drive died.  So, we brought it to the store, and eventually after much discussion and debate, they discovered that yes, a hard drive making a clicking noise and not booting up was in fact a dead hard drive.  So they replaced it.

Now, here we are less than 3 years later, and her computer starts going incredibly slow, and refusing to open Adobe Illustrator.  She is a graphic designer, so aside from a web browser, this is the most important thing on her PC.  I initially thought some Adobe update broke it, as their updates frequently refuse to install (on both PCs and Macs).  So, as I’m looking at it, I notice things like, oh, I don’t know, a 10 minute wait time to open the web browser, etc.

Long story short, I did some digging, and a program called OnyX which is a maintenance type piece of software (you can get it free from download.com) says I need to boot from the OSX install disk and run the disk utility.  (Hint: You can go to Apple menu->System Preferences->Startup Disk after inserting the CD to do this, or you can power the computer off, back on, and hold down the letter “C” on the keyboard after you here the “BONG!”) Guess what?  Disk utility says there’s a problem that it can’t fix.  So I go through some more hoops, do some googling, and decide to go to the local Apple Store for help picking out a drive utility.  I have to be honest – the Apple Store on a Saturday afternoon is not where you want to be.  To say it’s busy is an understatement.  So, I asked one of the salespeople which disk utility would work best, and asked if they could go ask one of the “Geniuses”. (I know, I laugh every time too) So, the sales rep honestly tells me this, that they are too busy, but if I go online I could read reviews of which software would work best.  This was extremely helpful – apparently there is this thing called the Internet!  Oh well – at least he didn’t say “All we have is what’s out there”.  But I digress.  So, after seeing other people online with the same sort of issue as me, some sort of Invalid Node error, everyone kept mentioning DiskWarrior.  So, rather than spend my hard earned money at the Apple Store, which its true, all they have is what’s out there, I bought it direct from the manufacturer for $99.

The nice thing about DiskWarrior, from a PC tech point of view, is that the disk is bootable.  So basically, same routine, put the disk in (after getting the OSX disk to eject, which involved holding down the Eject/Load button on the keyboard for an inordinate amount of time – Mac doesn’t trust you with a physical eject button because it might be too complicated for you to understand!) hold down the letter “C” on the keyboard until it gives you the twirling circle deal under the Apple logo, and you’re in.

It then scans your disk for problems and attempts to rebuild broken directories.  If you have a simple problem, I’m told this process runs in about 30-60 minutes.  Being that my drive is physically malfunctioning, I’m currently at 48 hours and counting.  It says underneath the progress bar “diskwarrior speed reduced by disk malfunction”.  After some more googling, and checking DiskWarrior’s website, this can take 1-4 days, and ask long as you can still move the mouse, it’s still allegedly recovering data.  I am told that once this process completes, we will be able to copy recovered data elsewhere.  I purchased a 500 GB external hard drive for the very reasonable price of $69.00 from Costco – it’s made by Seagate.

Stay tuned – when it finishes, I will post a continuation of this article on recovering the data.  I will also be replacing the 250 GB hard drive in it with a new 500 GB sata drive – so you will all get to see what the guts of an iMac look like.