Imac 20" early 2006 brain surgery

valdagno

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• Dec 4, 2014

• #1

I bought for a bargain price this beautiful imac that was without ram and hard disk and probably damaged.

The idea was to use the case and the monitor to build my second hack. This particular model is very fascinating to me, and I see one of them every time I go to my gas station so one day I decided I have to had one. Nowadays the 17" version is really too small so I searched on eBay till I found this.

 

apple524

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• Dec 6, 2014

• #2

you can fix or mod this iMac
good luck！

 

valdagno

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• Dec 7, 2014

• #3

By the time the imac arrived I had already bought the necessary tools according to the ifix guide and I have discovered that an old laptop it was given to me for free mount the same kind of ram and hard disk.
It had 2 x 2gb ram modules that are far more than this imac can get and a 200 gb sata hd that is not bad for testing.

 

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valdagno

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• Dec 7, 2014

• #4

So I prepared my surgery table on a free big table and stated to open the poor boy.

 

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valdagno

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• Dec 7, 2014

• #5

Thanks to ifix the process was not so complicated as I thought, it took me one our approximately.

 

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valdagno

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• Dec 7, 2014

• #6

I found that the hard disk was missing as well as some screws was.

I modified the original stand to mount a 2,5" hd. It was a one minute job with my new dremmell

 

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valdagno

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• Dec 7, 2014

• #7

I installed the hd disk and 2 gb of ram and pushed the button and ...... Taaaaa Daaaaaa. !

windows vista , that was previously installed on the hd come out

 

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valdagno

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• Dec 7, 2014

• #8

Then it took me a week or more of night work to install leopard.

i have no success neither with DVD nor with USB keys so in the end I succeeded using an external hard disk

 

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valdagno

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• Dec 7, 2014

• #9

Now that the mac is up and running I decided to give him a chance before to kill him so I bought a used intel core 2 duo T7600 on eBay as my personal Xmas gift.

This is the fastest cpu that the mobo can handle

and according to to this guy it's possible to reach a still decent configuration
http://www.tekrevue.com/stayin-alive-upgrading-cpu-hard-drive-ram-2006-imac/

we will see.

EDIT: the CPU in on the way from Germany hopefully I'll receive it for Xmas.

In the mean while i would like to write down the system ID and so on just in case i lost something during the cpu upgrade

 

valdagno

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• Jan 12, 2015

• #10

During the xmas vacation i Managed to swap the CPU and after i installed snow leopard. ( MANY THANKS TO IFIXIT)



This is a photo of the final part of the job.

Then following the advice of the link mentioned above i managed to modify the firmware to pretend to be a IMAC 5.1 ( late 2006) so i was able to install 4 gb of ram.