ever take an iMac apart and look at its guts?

scacinto

Registered
Hey y'all,
I'm standing here looking at the guts of an iMac (candy) G3, loathing it because of its very nature. The iMac is useless to me for many reasons, but useful in that it contains a 70 gig hard drive, worthy for use as a backup disc.

Do any of you suppose it's possible to scrap the useless surroundings of said iMac and harvest its hard disc for use as a backup disc for my G5?

I guess the appropriate questions would be a) where would I put it?... leave it sitting on a shelf next to the G5?.... cause i don't think it'd go in the box....

and b) would it actually work, or explode, taking out my precious G5 with it? I've never toyed with the hardware of my macs before... seems sacreligious for some reason, but after putting together a few PCs, i began to wonder if keeping around the useless shell of the iMac was worth the space....
 
Yes, it's definitely possible to remove the internal HD. I've done it myself, albeit with a different model (mine was an iMac DV+, one of the ones without any fans).

There are two ways you can use it with your G5. First of all, you could do what I did and buy an external FireWire hard disk enclosure. Transfer your internal drive from the iMac into that, and then use it with your G5 with FireWire. The FW enclosure I bought cost $35, which was the cheapest I could find.

The second option is to plug it into an empty drive bay (if there are any) in your G5. It shouldn't be much of a problem, at least in theory. I've never done it myself, though.
 
i would only do it with a firewire or usb case. the g5 hd interface is serial, where the imac is ide. are you sure that the imac drive is 70gig? that g3 game with a 7gig hd stock. there is room in the g5 case for the hd, but then you'd need to get an ide controller card for it, and that is kind of a dumb idea being serial speed it ata150 and the imac hd is ata66, it would just be really slow when it was used. see if you can find a usb2 hd/cd/dvd case and put the drive in it and only plug it in when you use it. i got a couple for about $20 to put hds and cd/dvd drives in and they work great.
 
And the really important thing:
Harvest those speakers! if they are the same as in my iMac DV (that i butchered last summer) they are realy kool-looking round things with really good sound. then use you m4d h4x0r-sKi11z (and some coppar-wire) and make them work as external speakers for you ipod, stereo, powermac. :)
 
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