Being the community oriented and overall kind fellow that he is, mcdermd hooked me up with BOTH a pair of 512mb PC-133 SDRAM stick (1gb total) and a whopping 120gb 7200 RPM HD for my traumatized Tangerine beauty. I just got both in the mail today. I was going to make it an Independence Day project, but decided to take a crack at it tonight.
I've disassembled a few tray-loading iMacs before and while there were A LOT of screws, it was all pretty straight forward. But taking a slot-loading apart is both simpler and more harrowing. Simpler, because it seems to me the screw count is quite a bit less (at least by recollection), but when it came time to get the bottom off, I was certain I was going to break the tabs off the front end. I stopped and pulled up several videos to make sure I was going about it the right way. The tabs are tightly attached and getting the bottom off required so much force that I thought for sure the cracking sound was the tabs breaking off. But amazingly, when I finally got it removed the tabs were no worse for wear.
Unfortunately, my poor Tangerine didn't come back completely unscathed from her ordeal. In addition to her Stockholm syndrome love for Alice In Chains, there were a number of various scrapes and small gouges on the case. The thief who took it also made a half-hearted attempt at removing the serial tag from the bottom. But even worse was that a part had broken off inside the iMac. When I flipped it over to remove the bottom, I heard
something rattling around inside. After getting the bottom and the inside cage off, I was able to shake out a number of broken pieces of plastic. They look to be the same material as the harness/bezel that holds the monitor. I examined the inside of the iMac very closely, but couldn't see any damage from the accessible areas. Not sure where it's broken, but it certainly took enough of a whack to break part of it off
somewhere.
After that, I set about cleaning the bottom cover. It was very dusty in there, and that dust was helping the iMac hold on to the memories of the cigar-smoking gentleman from where she used to live. After a couple of wipe downs, the inside was spic-and-span and the what was left of the cigar smell was already starting to dissipate. I took some compressed air and went over the cage and motherboard. It really wasn't necessary as there was only a trivial amount of dust.
From there it was a simple task of removing the memory modules, unhooking the cables and removing four screws. I put the new components in, put everything back together and gave her a boot. Everything came up fine, or at least as fine as it can with a hard drive that has no operating system on it. The only snafu I ran into was when reassembling everything I twisted the power button on the case and couldn't get it to disengage. But that was quickly fixed by removing the bottom cover, aligning the button and reassembling one last time. Now everything is ready for the OS install.
On that note, I'd like some advice on installing the OS. My plans are to install Mac OS 8.6 (the original OS for this iMac), OS X 10.4, Mac OS 9.2.2, Mac OS 8.7 beta and Rhapsody Developers Preview. I need some suggestions for partition sizes. The main OS will be 8.6 and is where I will be spending most of my time on this machine. OS X 10.4 will be for downloading and prepping files, as it's less hassle to get connected online for that sort of thing through OS X. Mac OS 9 will be there just in case there's something that needs Classic, but isn't working out in 8.6. The 8.7 beta and Rhapsody are there for tinkering and just the plain novelty of them.
I figure the formatted drive will be around 105gb. I was thinking allocation would be 70gb to OS 8.6; 30gb to OS X; 1gb to 8.7; and 4gb to Rhapsody. It's been sometime since I've had the Classic environment installed. I thought that it could live on the same partition as OS X, but I may be mis-remembering. An important question: Will this iMac need a firmware update before installing 10.4 or should it be fine?
I put together a post-install report tomorrow. Big THANKS to mcdermd for getting these parts to me. :approve:
Here's some pics to tide you over:
The plastic shards of whatever broke inside:
Here's what was removed after wiping the inside of the bottom cover:
(And lest you think this came off my foot -- I buy socks when they go on clearance. Often you can get a 6-pack for $1.00-1.50. After a washing to remove stray fibers, they make excellent rags and wipes and are much cheaper than buying a pack of rags for the same thing.)
Thief's half-hearted attempt at removing the serial tag:
Everything removed and ready for the upgrades:
Booted up and looking for an OS:
