Intel iMac Restore

My wife came to me one morning after she had been on her computer working on a graphic design job that was due that day. Her computer had started acting up and when she restarted she got a grey screen, a picture of an apple and a spinning gear below. Then nothing. She restarted a few times and even left it for 20 minutes and nothing. After some internet research we tried restarting in safe boot, single user mode, and a few other options. All of which started to boot and then would fail. We found the Mac OS X install discs and booted off of disc 1. Once the DVD was booted we ran the disk utility from the Utilities menu. We tried the verify and the repair options. Both of which would start to work and then just hang. At that point we decided the hard drive was probably either bad, or had unrepairable file system damage. We had a backup from Time Machine to an external hard drive so we felt pretty comfortable that we had most of the data backed up. However I never like to delete all my data until I know I have it so we decided we would spend the $65.00 for a new hard drive and restore from the backup to that.

NOTE: It appears Apple really does not want you messing around with the internals and thus it is not obvious by looking how to open the case. Also, opening the case will I believe void any warranty you have with Apple so I don't recommend it, however this computer was long since out of warranty and I could not wait days for a repair at an Apple store, so we decided to venture on our own.

Disassembly

The first order of business was to identify the hard drive type to ensure we purchased the correct replacement. Easy right? Open the case, look at the drive, and then head off to purchase the appropriate replacement. Yeah, we got stuck on step 1, open case, this was going to take a while!

The older Macs had three screws on the bottom that you would unscrew and then the back would come off. This 20" Intel iMac had only one screw on the bottom that opened up to upgrade the memory. No other visible way to open the case. After a bit of internet research it appears the screws to open the case are under the glass cover on the screen. The magic tool needed to get at them is a suction cup to remove the glass screen that is cleverly held into place with magnets.

SIDE NOTE: If I were the designer I would not put magnets around a computer that uses magnetic storage, but I am not a high paid engineer and it seems to work okay. But this seemed really counter intuitive to me.....

We found a suction cup at the local Ace Hardware store and pulled the glass cover off the screen which uncovered the screws to open the case. At this point there were about 12 torx head screws to remove the case.

With the screws taken out were were able to remove the front part of the case. To remove this we found the memory slot on the bottom needed to be opened. This was the one screw visible from the outside of the case and is directly above the stand. We started at the top of the case and seperated it. It seemed like part of it was still head together by the magnets so a little gentle force was needed. Then we were able to separate the bottom and remove the cover.

There was a wire for the camera when we removed the case. We flipped the case up and laid it down as shown below. We chose not to worry about disconnecting the camera cable. With the front of the case removed we next were able to see the eight torx screws that hold on the LCD.

Once we removed the screws that hold the LCD in place we were able to lift it up and reveal the rest of the components and the area we were looking to get at. There is one pair of wires connecting the LCD at the top and another pair of wires connecting the LCD at the bottom. We disconnected the top ones to lift up the LCD, but left the bottom cables connected, and I just had my wife hold it up while I removed the hard drive.

The hard drive is in the middle at the top. There are two torx screws and a plastic rail that hold it into place on the top side. The other side of the hard drive towards the bottom of the Mac is set into place with some peg type screws. At this point the hard drive removal was pretty easy, just remove the torx screws and a little slight of hand to remove it. Once loose the SATA and power cables disconnected easily. You can see a foam thing stuck to the hard drive. This appeared to be a temperature sensor under the foam which I carefully removed to preserve some sticky and just stuck it on the new hard drive in a similar fashion.

Once we had a new drive re-assembly was easy and just the reverse of what we had done. We had read some horror stories online that doing this, the case would never go back together the same and would leave scratches etc on the case. We did not find this to be an issue. Set it on a soft location (we used a bed) and just be careful.

Restoring the System

With the new drive in we were still concerned about getting everything back up and running. Once we had the Mac put back together we plugged the computer back in and turned it on with the OS X install DVD 1 in the drive. We held the 'C' key to get it to boot off the DVD.

This took a few tries. We had a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse and it took a few times to get the keyboard working to get the 'C' key press recognized and get it to boot off the DVD. The first few times we would get a grey screen and a flashing image of a folder with a question mark in it. My thought was 'Yes, you cannot find any files or folders on the hard drive. Probably because it is new! Why not try booting off the DVD?', but it didn't. We just powered off a few times and finally got the keyboard working and booted to the DVD.

At this point the remaining steps were pretty easy, I didn't think about it at first but the drive needed to be Mac formatted. To do this we went to the Utilities menu, and selected Disk Utility. In disk utility it has an erase option so I used that to get it to format the new drive with a Mac file system and to label the drive.

With the drive formatted we exited Disk Utility and again on the Utility menu of the Mac OS X DVD there was 'Restore From Backup'. We selected that and it walked us through connecting our Time Machine drive which once we plugged it in it found right away. On the next screen it asked us to select a full backup to restore. There had been one at 6:08am that morning so we selected that. It asked us where we wanted to restore to, and we selected the new hard drive we had formatted. It took it a few minutes to look at the backup we wanted to restore and the new drive and ensure there would be enough free space. Once it was happy we were able to continue.

Last it warned us that this would erase all data on the hard drive. Being a new hard drive I was not concerned and we had it proceed. The restore took almost two hours to run. The progress indicator gave us a percent complete and an estimated time to completion. We found the time to be way off, but the percent complete progressed slowly but surely.

When the restore was complete we were prompted to restart. This was the moment of truth. After holding our breath for a few minutes, sure enough my wife's desktop started to display, all her files, and all her programs! This was truly the easiest full system restore I had ever done! Microsoft could learn a thing or two from Apple!

At last we had a working system back again and were very happy. Only thing was my wife had a few files she had been working on that morning that were not in the backup. I have a USB to SATA adapter cable and we took the old drive and used the adapter cable to plug it into the computer via USB. It took a few minutes but it finally mounted the old drive. We were able to browse through its file system and find the few files she needed and copy them to the new hard drive.

In the end it was a bit of an experience having never had to recover a Mac before. But turned out to be only a $65.00 replacement hard drive and a little effort on our part and we had a no loss restore! Very happy in the end and very impressed with how easy it was to do. With it that easy, I don't know why Apple makes it so hard for users to be able to do their own hard drive replacement. I guess you do want to be careful inside as you are taking things apart and putting them back together again!

Hope this helps someone else out there restore their Mac. Lesson, BACKUP, BACKUP, BACKUP, especially since it is so easy with Time Machine to do backups and restores!