Repairing a G4 ‘Anglepoise’ iMac

My son’s school was chucking out a faulty 700 MHz G4 Anglepoise iMac – apprently it had an intermittant fault where the hard drive clicked and it wouldn’t boot. Of course I couldn’t bear to see this become land-fill so I brought it home to my Macintosh Sanctuary.

At first it seemed fine but whilst installing OS X, the thing died. Click, click, click. All I could do was get it to boot into Open Firmware – it wouldn’t even eject the CD-ROM. I was convinced I’d killed it, but a couple of bright sparks at work suggested that the hard drive might have just finally kicked the bucket. As it shares its IDE interface with the CD-ROM drive this might also explain why the CD wouldn’t eject. Armed with some instructions from XLER8YOURMAC, size 10 and 15 Torx (star-shaped) screwdrivers and an old 4GB Bondi Blue iMac hard drive, I explored.

I actually found the whole thing easier than that article suggested. First using a small cross-pointed screwdriver you undo the base plate to get at the user-servicable parts – a memory slot and Airport card slot:

Then the big Torx T15 screwdriver comes into play – undo the 4 Torx screws and pull the whole base – including the white plastic bit where the ports are. Be gentle but firm as you are unplugging connectors as you do this.

At this point you can swap its internal memory card if you like, but I was interested in the grey drive assembly. I disconnected its IDE connector on the motherboard and unclipped the 2 cables clamped to its right. Then I used the T10 Torx screwdriver to remove the 6 screws holding the drive assembly in place (click on photo to see notes):

I then pulled the drive assembly down and towards me.

I then removed the IDE and power connectors from the hard drive, peeled the strange white plastic wrapper off and removed the IDE drive from its caddy using a Torx screwdriver.

I replaced it with a 4 GB hard drive from my original 233 MHz Bondi Blue iMac – one tenth the size of the one I removed but this was a temporary measure to prove that this was the problem before I shell out some real money on an 80GB drive. I put it all back together, forgetting the thermal paste for now, and turned it on:

I’ve never been so pleased to see the OS 9 splash screen! That old iMac hard drive must have been confused though – it fell asleep in a 233 MHz CRT G3 Bondi Blue iMac and woke up in a 700 MHz LCD G4 anglepoise iMac… I never liked the G4 iMac when it came out, but now I have one I think it’s a great machine. And easier to get inside than the Bondi Blue beastie…