The drive arrived, sorry guys, didn't get a camera to get any pics and the way it opened up you'd need some profesional lighting and the right background to get the perspective.
But wow! what an adventure, getting the case off was easy enough and an obvoius wire to it for the power button needed to be unplugged. I was sweating and nervous at that point but continued into the unknown. I looked. I can see the CD/DVD drive quite easy. I can see where the ram is and it's extra slot for another stick, but where the hell is the hard drive? The diagrams I looked at didn't really specify where the HD is and how to get to it, so I....
... it must be behind the fan? I begun digging into the mission by undoing this screw, then that screw, another screw over here and this screw had lost it bores that not even a flat head screwdriver could loosen it. Things were not getting me anywhere. So to research more into my task I fired up my old 7500 PPC with OS9 on it and googled for answers. As iCab struggled to load pages through my ADSL I kept looking into the wires and mechanism of the eMac. Finally a page loaded with some pics of the HD. I looked back at my machine. Closer and deeper. There, I spotted a tin shape that could possibly fit a HD into. I looked around the otherside and behold, I can see it.
I knew how to get to it then. I unscrewed some more, then screwed back in the ones that got me nowhere. Finally a result after moving away the fan. I had to tilt the eMac onto it's side from off the screen surface I had faced down during the unveiling of the interior. The awkwardness of undoing the screws around the casing of the HD was as frustrating as trying to explain to a Windogs user that Macs are better machines (and that's a frustrating arguement).
Swapping the drive was a breeze (*wipes sweat off face here) but there still remained the (mental) task of putting all this back together. I was doing well. Things replaced nicely, slotted in place, screwed in correctly and even remembered to plug in plugs I unplugged in places too. However I did have an issue putting the outer case back on but discovered one plate was out slightly, so undid that and got it in correctly. Hmmm, five left over screws, what have I missed?
So all was fine, now for the test. I nested the eMac in it's usual position on my desk. Looking quite nice and pretty too as I also cleaned out a lot of the dust that had built in and out of it. At this stage I had only plugged in the keyboard, mouse and the obvious, the power lead. I started the machine, it lit up, it did what I expected, not find a system.
I waited for a minute expecting the CD/DVD tray to open automatically for me hopeing to put in the install disk. But it didn't. I pressed the eject key, still no response. I paniced, but calmed at the thought of shutting it down and restart and hold down the mouse button for the draw to open. It opened.
I formatted and installed OS X10.4 with success. The startup with the system on board had a greenish color rather then the normal light blue around the Apple Logo. After log in and checking around and putting in my backups and things, when it came to iCal it wasn't right. The icon is more of a chocolatey brown rather then the normal red. Weird, I investigated more into as in the Label Colors and everything but red is correct. Went through ColorSync and everything but no change.
Sorry I can't upload a screenshot as it looks normal on my friends machine when I sent him a screenshot. So as Saxaline suggested, I zapped the Pram. Nothing had changed. I'm not sure what I have done? I wonder if cleaning the dust had fallen down into the screen when it was facing down? Or is it one of those five screws I've left out? Who knows? Is there anything else I can try after zapping the Pram?
I do have to go back into the routine again sometime to retrieve more files from the old hard drive, I will look where those screws should be, but I'm not convinced that would be the problem.
