A few weeks ago, my daughter’s (hand-me-down) 20″ iMac G5 started acting up. It was showing the infamous “spinning beachball”, was locking up, the fan was running a lot and loud and the machine was having kernel panics. I did a quick S.M.A.R.T. scan on it which is usually a good indication of the health (or lack there of) of a hard drive. The results of that test confirmed my suspicions, the hard drive was dying and needed to be replaced immediately. I made a quick clone of it right away!
So I started asking around on Twitter for some recommendations on good replacement hard drives. I didn’t need much, something that was comparable to the 250GB hard drive that was in there. Well, the people at iFixit.com saw my tweets and suggested a few options. I have used iFixit’s repair guides many, many times and have referenced them in previous how-to posts as well as on Twitter quite a few times. I personally find their guides to be irreplaceable and mandatory for any computer “surgery” that I might perform. One thing lead to another, and it ended up that I received a donated drive from iFixit. So, it is only fair that I acknowledge that fact and thank them as well. THANKS iFixit!
Anyway, I’m not a stranger to replacing hard drives. I have done it quite a few times on my MacBook Pro and my PowerBook G4′s (pretty difficult task on both of those actually) as well as on PCs (which is a bit easier). The first time I really hacked into a Mac was when I put a SuperDrive into an iMac DV SE (that was my first purchased Mac back in the day…I still have it!). Regardless, I wouldn’t attempt any repair without first taking a look at an appropriate iFixit guide.
The guide that I used is this one (having first gone through an identification wizard to ensure that the proper guide for my Mac was being displayed). After that, I started on my hard drive replacement adventure. I’m not going to go through all of the steps of replacing the hard drive because that is what the iFixit guide is for. However, I did document the process in this video:
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