Broken iMAC...

**fatbastard** · Posted: Thu, 22 Jul 2004 12:32:20 Post Subject: Broken iMAC...

I tried to help my sister out the other night by taking a look at her old iMAC that stopped working. We were hoping to move the memory from the broken one to another and hopefully get the info off the old HD. Unfortunately the memory is not the smae and it doesn't look like you can add another HD even temporarily. Are there any programs taht would allow me to install the HD in a PC and copy the files onto a cd-r? I haven't tried it but I am guessing the partitioning will be wrong, NE ideas?

**Doctor Feelgood** · Posted: Thu, 22 Jul 2004 12:46:53 Post Subject:

What about an external drive enclosure? Do you have one already?

Do you need to move the memory? Confused

(lol - nice avatar)

thePMG · Rated XXX Joined: 24 Apr 2004 Posts: 393 Location: Germany

if its an OS X based machine, it's most likely an HFS+ partiton, that windows, no surprise, dosen't have a clue about. A quick google turns up this:

http://www.macdisk.com/mden.php3

It looks like what you need, but I couldn't find any info on it's price. I would do like BB says, and get the external drive enclosure, which would be infinitly more useful in the long run.

BTW, what model imac, and do you know the exact prob?

**fatbastard** · Posted: Thu, 22 Jul 2004 20:10:50 Post Subject:

I don't know how they designate their models but it does say it is family #M5521 with 350MHz/512K L2/64MB/6GB/CD. It really isn't anything special, she would just like to get the info off the drive.

BB, I don't have a 5.25 external, just the laptop enclosure. Even with that I don't know if windows will recognize it. I thought with the other drives I have I needed to format before XP could do anything with it.

As for the problem, they think it is the power button but I don't think so. Last time this happened the switch needed to be replaced, it is sticking now but I took apart teh case and hit teh button directly and still nothing. The mac starts to do something, makes the start up sound and then hangs on a gray screen. I tried moving the memory to another slot but still nothing. I didn't hear the HD spinning but I would have thought it would do something then fail like with windows. I really don't have a clue.

**Doctor Feelgood** · Posted: Thu, 22 Jul 2004 20:17:48 Post Subject:

I thought you had another Mac you could try the external drive on... But, that still doesn't help the 2.5 to 3.5 inch issue. I have an adaptor, but it goes the other direction...

thePMG · Rated XXX Joined: 24 Apr 2004 Posts: 393 Location: Germany

Do you have the apple hardware test CD to boot and test the system out with? By what your describing, it sounds like the HDD might be gone, since what you see at boot is the firmware on the mobo, until the HDD takes over.

**fatbastard** · Posted: Fri, 23 Jul 2004 08:06:37 Post Subject:

There is another imac but I think it runs an older OS and doesn't support the external drive. I was going to put the HD from the bad one into the good one to see what happens but the layouts are completely different and it looks like a major pita to get to it. Maybe I will throw the HD in my PC and see if it sees it, even if it thinks it is jibberish at least I will know hte drive operates.

**fatbastard** · Posted: Mon, 23 Aug 2004 12:17:12 Post Subject:

Well, I got this thing fixed. I finally decided to just gut the thing and get teh HD out so I could have a chance of recovering the info. when I got the drive out I noticed that it looked like it shorted to teh case. Not sure why, I couldn't find anything loose, but I threw a new HD in there and sure enough it works now. By the way, I have to hand it to MAC, I installed the new drive, turned it on, inserted teh image disk and about 5 clicks and 20 mintues later the drive was formated and the OS was ready.