A new Hard Drive for an IMac.

davev · December 30, 2007

I have a year and half old, 20" duo core IMac with a 250 gig hard drive in it.
I would like to change out the hard drive to a 500 or 750 gig HD.

Has anyone here done this?
Can anyone point me to a site that can show me what to expect when I open the box up?

I'm looking at getting the new OSX so I figured this would be a good time to try changing the drive.
(that and the fact that the drive is just about out of space).

I've dug into plenty of PC's, so I not to worried about this, but I figure if I can get some help, why not.

pathfinder · December 30, 2007

Google is your friend, Dave

http://home.comcast.net/~woojo/DFFA53A0-F23D-4541-9015-481FD3B6532E/iMac_Disassembly.html

http://forums.dealmac.com/read.php?4,2620389

davev · December 30, 2007

pathfinder wrote:

Google is your friend, Dave

http://home.comcast.net/~woojo/DFFA53A0-F23D-4541-9015-481FD3B6532E/iMac_Disassembly.html

http://forums.dealmac.com/read.php?4,2620389

I did "a" search, but not as good of one as you.

Thanks Path, the slide show was all I needed.

Now, 500, or 750?

pathfinder · December 30, 2007

Go big or stay home!:D

You're a braver man than I, Gunga Din

Miguel Delinquento · December 30, 2007

You are brave
I have many geeky PC friends who had moved over to that model of iMac. They were considering upgrading the internal hard drive themselves, but after I showed them those pictures (this was a few months ago) they decided to have an authorized Apple service joint do it. If you provide the drive, they will charge only an hour or so of labor and your warranty remains intact (if that is relevant).
Please let us know how it goes!

M

Jeroen · December 30, 2007

Have you considered getting an extra (external) harddrive instead of a transplant?

J.T. · December 30, 2007

try owc

davev wrote:

I have a year and half old, 20" duo core IMac with a 250 gig hard drive in it.
I would like to change out the hard drive to a 500 or 750 gig HD.

Has anyone here done this?
Can anyone point me to a site that can show me what to expect when I open the box up?

I'm looking at getting the new OSX so I figured this would be a good time to try changing the drive.
(that and the fact that the drive is just about out of space).

I've dug into plenty of PC's, so I not to worried about this, but I figure if I can get some help, why not.

I've been a loyal mac user for many years and have replaced RAM and hard drives on both desktops and powerbooks, just not an imac. I do recommend buying and researching for a new hard drive from OWC, check out macsales.com for their site. They are really helpful and they also have all kinds of tutorials and videos of installs on their site. A good resource for you to look before doing the swap.

Good luck!

photocat · December 30, 2007

As a previous poster said, have it done by an apple retailer. To keep your guarantee. Also, I wanted to get an internal 500 gig one, and they counter advised it, they told me to get an external instead. They had some customers come in with problems in the iMacs with bigger then the 300 gig one...
I went for an external one, and am very happy with it.
My new iMac now has 300 gig internal, together with the big external a good chunk of storage. I use the external for Time Machine backup. Works a charm.

pathfinder · December 30, 2007

Jeroen wrote:

Have you considered getting an extra (external) harddrive instead of a transplant?

External Firewire Raid arrays ( 2 500Gb drives ) can be had for less than $400 these days, and 250 Gb is more than adequate for the boot drive with most applications needed by most of us - I have OS X, PSCS3, Lightroom, iWorks, over 20Gb of music, etc all on a 250Gb boot drive and still have 120Gb left on it.

My external raid array, has additional firewire ports on it to add additional drives to if needed, also. Western Digital My Book Pro

Why the need for a new, larger internal drive?

davev · December 30, 2007

Why a new internal drive?

I already have a 500 gig external (USB) for backing up my photos.
I want a large enough drive inside so I have all my files in 2 spots.

So I bought a 750 gig (go big or not at all) to put inside.

The trouble I'm having now is trying to figure out how to do a full backup of the internal drive that's in the machine now.
I've just been manually sending my photos to the ext. drive up to this point.
I've looked at the manual, but I'm just lost.
I used a PC for years. Even though I've had this machine for a year and a half, (it's out of warranty) the Mac operating system is a mystery to me.

Anyway, here's my plan.

1) backup everything on the internal drive to the 500 gig ext.

2) Make a startup disk. (anybody now how to do this, or do I just use the OSX (tiger) disk)

3) Swap out the drives.

4) Restore the backup onto the new drive.

5) Install the new Mac OSX. (Leopard)

I'd like to do it in this order so I don't have to reinstall every piece of software on my machine.

At that point I would have a 750 gig inside the machine, a 500 gig for photo backup, I would install the 250 gig into an external box and back up my OSX and apps to that drive.

This is the grand plan.

So, how do I make a startup disk, and is there built-in backup software in the OSX operating system? (tiger)

As for it being tough to change out the hard drive.
As long as don't force anything I should be OK.
As far as I can see, it takes a philips screwdriver to do the job.
I'm way more worried about the software end of this change than I am about the hardware end of it.

photocat · December 30, 2007

OK, here is my try...
What I would do is install Leopard in the present machine. You have a built in back up system in Leopard, Time Machine, if you let that one run for a couple of days, you have a very good copy of your hard disk. You would have the time machine back up to the external.

If you then put in the 750 gig one, and install leopard on that one, it should ask you if you have an older computer with stuff to transfer, via time machine.

You can do this over airport or fire wire.

Another back up program that creates disk images from your mac is super duper, that one can also create a bootable disk for you.

Ask around some more, but I would go for the Leopard time machine thing. I swopped everything from my old imac to my new one fourteen days ago, it took me an hour or so, and I did not loose one single thing...

pathfinder · December 30, 2007

You need a copy of SuperDuper $27.95

This will let you have a bootable, duplicate of your hard drive, complete with all your apps.

Back up your system drive to your external firewire drive. Remove your system drive and install the 750 Gb new drive into the iMac. Boot from your external backup drive, and copy the back up drive to your new system drive via SuperDuper, and you should have a new Macintosh Hard drive of 750Gb.

If you are wanting to install a new operating system ( Leopard ), do this to your back up drive via a DVD boot AFTER you already have the 750Gb drive up and running with all your old software via SuperDuper. Keep your old 250Gb drive you removed, as a last ditch back up, that you can reinstall it, in case this does not go as planned. Run your computer with your external drive as your boot drive for a few days before copying it onto your 750Gb drive to make sure that Leopard and your apps are all behaving themselves. I will say that I installed Leopard on my MacBookPro without any issues with PSCS3, or LR.

This is basically what I did when my PowerMac died and was re-built by Apple with a new mother board and processor. I had to format my original hard drive before I sent it back to Apple, so I just copied my B/U drive back to my main drive when I got my machine back from the repair shop. I did not have to re-install ANY software including PSCS3, LR, Aperture or SuperDuper

SuperDuper is well worth the cost - It has saved me hours and hours of work. I now keep two back up copies of my main drive. Data are all kept on other separate drives.

KED · December 30, 2007

pathfinder wrote:

You need a copy of SuperDuper $27.95

This will let you have a bootable, duplicate of your hard drive, complete with all your apps.

Back up your system drive to your external firewire drive. Remove your system drive and install the 750 Gb new drive into the iMac. Boot from your external backup drive, and copy the back up drive to your new system drive via SuperDuper, and you should have a new Macintosh Hard drive of 750Gb.

If you are wanting to install a new operating system ( Leopard ), do this to your back up drive via a DVD boot AFTER you already have the 750Gb drive up and running with all your old software via SuperDuper. Keep your old 250Gb drive you removed, as a last ditch back up, that you can reinstall it, in case this does not go as planned. Run your computer with your external drive as your boot drive for a few days before copying it onto your 750Gb drive to make sure that Leopard and your apps are all behaving themselves. I will say that I installed Leopard on my MacBookPro without any issues with PSCS3, or LR.

This is basically what I did when my PowerMac died and was re-built by Apple with a new mother board and processor. I had to format my original hard drive before I sent it back to Apple, so I just copied my B/U drive back to my main drive when I got my machine back from the repair shop. I did not have to re-install ANY software including PSCS3, LR, Aperture or SuperDuper

SuperDuper is well worth the cost - It has saved me hours and hours of work. I now keep two back up copies of my main drive. Data are all kept on other separate drives.

I got a little lost in your sequencing, so this may be irrelevant, but it may be worth mentioning that at the moment, SuperDuper! is not compatible with Leopard/Time Machine. I've been following the updates on this for several months, and it should be resolved within a matter of a week or two according to their blog.

DavidTO · December 30, 2007

Dave, do this:

1) make a full, bootable clone using SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner. Either one is free for what you need. Make sure you've done this to a Firewire drive. That is important. Firewire.

2) Install the new drive (or have a tech do it for you), and install Leopard on it.

3) Once you start up the computer with the new drive it will ask you if you are migrating from an older machine. Say yes, and pretend that your firewire back up is your old machine. The Mac will magically move all of your stuff to the new machine for you.

4) Enjoy your new system.

This has the major advantage of not updating the old system to the new, but of just putting a new, fresh system on your disk. Much betterer.

davev · December 30, 2007

DavidTO wrote:

Dave, do this:

1) make a full, bootable clone using SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner. Either one is free for what you need. Make sure you've done this to a Firewire drive. That is important. Firewire.

2) Install the new drive (or have a tech do it for you), and install Leopard on it.

3) Once you start up the computer with the new drive it will ask you if you are migrating from an older machine. Say yes, and pretend that your firewire back up is your old machine. The Mac will magically move all of your stuff to the new machine for you.

4) Enjoy your new system.

This has the major advantage of not updating the old system to the new, but of just putting a new, fresh system on your disk. Much betterer.

Big problem here, my external is a USB drive.
I don't have a firewire drive.

So, how about this.

I buy a Firewire external box.
I put the new 750 gig drive into it.
I backup or copy or whatever the c: drive to the firewire drive.
I take the 750 gig drive out of the firewire box and put it into the IMac.

At this point I pray that the IMac finds the new drive and runs the way it did with the old 250 gig drive in it.
Then I install the new OSX.

Does this sound like it will work?

DavidTO · December 30, 2007

davev wrote:

Does this sound like it will work?

Yes, but make sure you do an archive and install. This archives your old system (and calls it "Previous System") and then puts a new, fresh system on the drive. This is much better than upgrading Tiger to Leopard. You want to start fresh with the system. Keep the previous system for a couple of weeks till you're sure the dust has settled, and then delete it, as it's just wasting space at that point.

davev · December 31, 2007

Thanks guys.

I'll be trying this sometime this week.
Hopefully I don't screw up.

<<<An edit to this.>>>

I decided to just buy another 750gb external drive (firewire) to help me make the switch of the internal drive.
This way I should be able to to complete backup easier as well.

I got about $600 into this upgrade. It seems like a lot of cash, but in the long run I'll have a safer system for storing my photos and other work.

davev · January 3, 2008

Ok, I have my IMac in a hundred pieces, removed the 250 gb drive, started to install the new one. But wait.
As I look at the plugs I can plainly see that they are different.
The drive in the IMac says that it's a Serial ATA drive.
The one that I bought says it's a SATA drive. (on the box)

Is the SATA (the plugs look like those of an IDE drive) supposed to be the same as an Serial ATA drive?

I haven't changed any drives for a while so I just don't know.

The drive on the bottom is the drive that was in the Imac.

Info from the original.

cmason · January 4, 2008

The drive you bought is not a SATA...check again, does the box say PATA?

That is a IDE (Parallel) connector on that new harddrive.

davev · January 4, 2008

cmason wrote:

The drive you bought is not a SATA...check again, does the box say PATA?

That is a IDE (Parallel) connector on that new harddrive.

The box says SATA on it.

I think someone returned an old hard drive to best buy.
The drive box didn't have any software, cables, or instructions with it.
I sure returning this will be a lot of fun.

If look at where the power cable connects, first thing, there are no pins,
but also it looks like the casing is broke.

Oh well.

cmason · January 4, 2008

davev wrote:

The box says SATA on it.

I think someone returned an old hard drive to best buy.
The drive box didn't have any software, cables, or instructions with it.
I sure returning this will be a lot of fun.

If look at where the power cable connects, first thing, there are no pins,
but also it looks like the casing is broke.

Oh well.

yes the power connector is very broken from your photo. What does the label on the drive say it is? If you go to the drive manufacturer website, most allow you to type in the HD serial number and it will tell you want kind of drive it is.

DavidTO · January 4, 2008

Didja hear about the two guys that bought iPods from Target online?

Guy 1 got a box of rocks, which Target fixed by replacing with the iPod he ordered originally.

Guy 2 had his iPod switched, some guy in the packing dept. put his old, beat up iPod in, and re-shrink wrapped it. That guy got hosed, because Target said, "We can't take this back, the serial numbers don't match." To which the guy said, "No s**t."

omgitsacamera · January 4, 2008

Here's my dilemma:

Will I be able to put either a a 500GB to 1TB without any problems? (I heard that it might be bad if its over 300GB.)

I also checked on OWC for hard drives and I found the 500GB, 1TB and 750GB as most popular, respectively. Does anyone use these drives? How are they?

And secondly, how would I be able to transfer everything after I install Leopard on the new machine if my external is USB?

DavidTO · January 4, 2008

omgitsacamera wrote:

Here's my dilemma:

Will I be able to put either a a 500GB to 1TB without any problems? (I heard that it might be bad if its over 300GB.)

Put it where? In what?

I also checked on OWC for hard drives and I found the 500GB, 1TB and 750GB as most popular, respectively. Does anyone use these drives? How are they?

OWC is great. They don't make the drives, though, so you're buying Seagate or whatever.

And secondly, how would I be able to transfer everything after I install Leopard on the new machine if my external is USB?

Well, you should be using FW, and I would just buy a new case and move the drive, then you can use Migration Assistant. With a USB you can move the files manually, however. It's just more trouble is all.

omgitsacamera · January 4, 2008

DavidTO wrote:

Put it where? In what?

The iMac.

DavidTO wrote:

OWC is great. They don't make the drives, though, so you're buying Seagate or whatever.

Yeah, I was looking at one of the Western Digitals.

davev · January 5, 2008

Time to give credit where credit is due.

I took the drive back to Best Buy to exchange it, and the kid at the return
desk was polite and apologetic about what happened.

He did have to check with his manager, but when all was said and done,
the exchange was trouble free.

I know at different times I have called them "Worst Buy", so I feel I should
give them praise when things are done right.

Now that I have the proper drive, I'm planning on installing it Sat.
Taking the IMac apart really wasn't that tough, thanks to the link
earlier in this thread. Hopefully it goes back together as good as it
came apart.

With a little luck, I'll have it up and running by Sunday.
The reason I say Sunday is because of the time it took to back up
the old hard drive with 230GB's of info. (4 1/2 hours)
Basically, I need to run the backup program again to the new internal
drive. So I guessing it will be another 4 1/2 hours.
After it's up and running for a couple of days, then I'll install the new
OSX. After the OSX is running well, then I need to put windows on it.

Or maybe I'll go take some pictures instead this weekend.

Anyways, thanks for all the help guys.

davev · January 5, 2008

The last installment for this thread.
The IMac is back together and working great.
It took 2 1/2 hours for the backup to install onto the drive.
It boots, and all seems well.
The toughest part of the job was putting the screen back into the case.
The black foil kept getting in the way, and putting the screws in that hold the screen (4) took the most time.
They go below the screen, and are hard to see. If you do this, get a magnetic torque's. It will help a lot.

That's it.
I now have an IMac with a 750gb drive in it, a 750gb drive for back up, and a 500gb, and a 250gb for triple backup of my photos.

Next task will be loading Leopard and Windows XP. Boot camp comes with the new OSX, so now I'll be able to install the Windows programs that I've missed since the move to Mac.

Thanks again for all the help.

Miguel Delinquento · January 6, 2008

I'm Impressed
Wow, you did it! I'm truly impressed, I wouldn't have the guts to dicker with the video components.

If you use those Windows apps somewhat frequently, consider using Parallels or VMware Fusion. I ditched Boot Camp early on. The other two applications are somewhat magical and affordable.

M

A new Hard Drive for an IMac.

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