Jon Ward very kindly gave me a 20 gig hard drive out of an old family iMac to replace the 4 gig one on my FrankenMac (it’s a RevA 233 MHz Bondi Blue iMac with a fried flyback transformer and a grody old Elonex VGA monitor glued on to it).
I have a service manual for the iMac somewhere, but that was way too easy – instead I drank half a bottle of red wine and set to it with my screwdriver set.
Well it’s more fun that way. More of a challenge.
Some may tell you that the iMac was designed by Jonathan Ive. I say it was designed by a sadistically warped sadist. It is insanely difficult to get inside, as I remember from when I added more RAM years ago. Nice to see that the Mezzanine slot really was labelled ‘mezzanine’, though.
I ended up completely removing the motherboard – possibly needlessly – but eventually I prised the caddy holding the hard drive out, swapped it and put it all back together. Ok, the CD-ROM drive doesn’t fit perfectly anymore, but I can fix that later.
Remembering that RevA iMacs must have the 1st HD partition no bigger than 8 Gigs, I booted off an OS 9 install disc and partitioned the disk. I was a bit puzzled to find rather large ‘unused portions’ cropping up – almost 1 Gig when I manually typed in 8000 MB as the 1st partition size. Dragging the lines on the partition map proved more fruitful, though – I could get my 1st partiton to just inder 8000 MB and minimize the wasted space.
And here I am now, running OS 9.2 as before, only now with more than 5 times the hard disk space I had before.
Next step – OS 10.3… better check my firmwware’s up to date, snicker snicker, or it’s good night Cupertino.