Upgrading my iMac MB324LL/A

My 320GB hard drive is starting to fill up on my iMac so I decided to get a 1TB hard drive. I knew opening the iMac is going to be a pain. I’ve seen videos from YouTube on how to open the previous plastic models and it looked hard. Nevertheless, I needed to upgrade my hard drive and I want someone else to do it. Besides, I wanted to know how to do it and do it myself. So the first thing I needed to do is look for videos on YouTube. I kept getting the plastic iMac model but kept searching. I found 2 pretty good videos: by lexusnut and by Zenn3k. Those were my starting point.

Update: their videos on Youtube are no longer there. I’ll keep their usernames in the post just to show credit.

It took my cousin and I two hours to finally access the motherboard area. I cannot stress enough on how careful you must be. Apple has placed wires in many areas where if you lift something quickly, you may pull it out of place or unplug it – leading to damaging your device. We documented the process and uploaded it on YouTube to help others. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfLmsrMafXs]

My 320GB hard drive is starting to fill up on my iMac so I decided to get a 1TB hard drive. I knew opening the iMac is going to be a pain. I’ve seen videos from YouTube on how to open the previous plastic models and it looked hard. Nevertheless, I needed to upgrade my hard drive and I want someone else to do it. Besides, I wanted to know how to do it and do it myself. So the first thing I needed to do is look for videos on YouTube. I kept getting the plastic iMac model but kept searching. I found 2 pretty good videos: by lexusnut and by Zenn3k. Those were my starting point.

It took my cousin and I two hours to finally access the motherboard area. I cannot stress enough on how careful you must be. Apple has placed wires in many areas where if you lift something quickly, you may pull it out of place or unplug it – leading to damaging your device. We documented the process and uploaded it on YouTube to help others.

So now I got the new 1TB hard drive installed. How do I get my old system on the new drive? There are 2 ways to do this. The first way is to use Time Machine (if you actually did use it). You can install a fresh copy of Leopard on the new hard drive. After installation, you get an option to use a Time Machine back up to restore. I’ve tried this but since I have over 200GB of data, my iMac ends up sleeping while trying to load the data to restore.

The second option is the image the old hard drive and restore it on the new one. This option took me about a day to complete. What you will need is an external hard drive, your old hard, and the new hard drive. If you image your old drive before installing the new one, you don’t need a second external enclosure. The first thing you’ll do is to boot your computer using the Leopard DVD. Open Disc Utility on the Leopard DVD. Do not do this while booted on the hard drive. It’s possible that it will not work because the drive you are imaging is in use. The external hard drive is where you will save the image file. Once finished, restore the image onto the new hard drive. That’s pretty much a brief summary of what I did.

I did run into some errors while formatting the new hard drive. This post helped me outhttp://macosx.com/forums/hardware-peripherals/290989-disk-utility-problem-erasing-large-external-hard-drive.html.

The image/restore process took most of the day. It may be quicker or longer for you, depending on the size of the data. Make sure you take any necessary precautions before working on your expensive Apple hardware 😉

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4 Comments

  1. what kind of screw driver did u use for the last two screw’s in the video( the ones that you refer to as being the biggest pain). I have no freaking idea were to even begin looking for what ever the hell it is…… thanks man your vid rocks! and it was a great help. thank you.-sean

  2. hey I have the same Imac you have , but I have some concerns about the memory upgrade availability , since I read that this Imac is only up to 750 GB upgrade not 1TB , so I am pretty confused ,please help me out on this cause I wanna go and do as well , thanks ,this are my specifications and I also logged the link where I saw that on the apple support http://support.apple.com/kb/sp… Model Name:iMac Model Identifier:iMac8,1 Processor Name:Intel Core 2 Duo Processor Speed:2.66 GHz Number Of Processors:1 Total Number Of Cores:2 L2 Cache:6 MB Memory:4 GB Bus Speed:1.07 GHz Boot ROM Version:IM81.00C1.B00 SMC Version (system):1.29f1 Hardware UUID:261B8825-264C-5EE9-BEBC-5664BB31DA2C

    1. my iMac is running 1TB hard drive right now. it is 3.5″ SATA. you should have no problems running up to 1.5TB. if you do, then return it and get 1TB.

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