Part One
Few days ago (June 8th), I managed to get this nice 2006 iMac. It features a 1.83GHz Intel Core Duo Processor, 512MB RAM (PC2-5300 DDR2 at 667MHz), has 160 storage in an HDD, and a Radeon X1600 with 128MB GDDR3, all these tucked in nicely behind a 17" screen.
The price the seller was asking was €30, but I managed to haggle down to €20, as it was untested. The outside looks pretty well, and although it needs a thorough clean, it’s in a very good condition. I found a cable in the house, plugged in a keyboard and a mouse and started it up. And it boots!
However, the Mac OS is in German, and both accounts that were on the system were protected with a password, so I tried to bypass this, but after booting in single-user mode and trying to mount the hard drive, it failed. The clicks and the noises it made when booting were pretty much a nice warning of the inevitable doom of the drive, which I ignored until it was too late. So what else to do than try to open it up?
And while iFixIt has a good disassembly guide. I eventually found a way to get to the hard drive and I replaced it with a 750GB IBM drive made in 2008 to put all my music on it. Everything went smoothly, up to the point where I had to reformat the drive and install MacOSX Snow Leopard.
Unbeknownst to me, that pretty cat requires at least one jiggabyte of RAM to install, which I don’t have, so I had to download the ISO for MacOSX Leopard, which should install. All said and done, burned this again to an USB stick using Balena Etcher. After configuring the setup, the installer said that it’s going to take about 2 hours and 40 minutes to install everything. I’ve installed Mac OS in all their variants for a lot of times, so I was expecting the installer to be wrong. However, the process started at 4:20PM, and I left to eat in town to meet with some friends and have a nice evening outside. I then talked with a good friend over IRC for a while and now it’s 2:25AM, 10 hours later and the thing still thinks it has “about 5 minutes left”, but it says that for over 40 minutes now. At this point I’m considering not going to sleep, just to see at what hour it finishes. By now, I already ordered a 480GB SSD and it might arrive before the installer finishes to do its job. I think that this hard drive might be borked, and I have an identical one roaming around in the house, so I think I’ll do some write testing on it to see how it goes, but I think both are unreliable now.
Returning to the install process, at about 2:45 the cursor turned into the beach ball and I think it’s loading the next step of the setup.
Meanwhile, I’m testing the identical hard drive and it seems to copy constantly via an USB interface at a solid and constant 40MB/s which is not a lot, but it’s something.
4AM and it’s still at “about 5 minutes left”. There’s nothing to lose at the moment, so I’ll just forcefully power off and try to boot with whatever’s installed. After the restart, the setup restarted from zero and it seems the setup process wrote only about 13 GB of data on the hard drive. This time I clicked customize and unchecked the “Printer Drivers”, which seems to try to install about 3GB of data.
It seems to run pretty fast and though it says that time remaining is “1 hour and 13 minutes”, the progress bar seems to have moved pretty fast. Thirty minutes later, the progress bar is in the same spot and it still says “1 hour and 13 minutes”. Guess it’s time for me to shutdown for the weekend and just wait for the SSD and do this properly. Meanwhile I’ll search for some RAM.
Waking up in the morning after leaving the second HDD to get some music on it, I found it ticking and very very very hot (78ºC), which makes me realize that these hard drive are a very very good coffee mug warmer and that they can’t be trusted to hold any valuable data. So it’s off to the bin with them and I’ll wait for the new SSD to arrive. Moreover, I also found 3 sticks of 1GB of RAM, which is great, because I can use two to max out this system and the third one in one of the 2006 Macbooks.
Part Two
I’ve decided to make some upgrades to the computer, but before that, I decided I should clean it up a bit, so I gave it a good scrub on the outside, as it was pretty needed, as it was a bit dirty and the transparent layer of the outer shell tends to get a lot of scuffs and scratches. Spending some time closely wiping every part of this, I was able to look more in detail at the design details of the case, and it’s absolutely beautiful.
On the inside, the computer is almost in pristine condition, there’s some dust on the fans, but not a lot, which makes me believe that this hasn’t been used too much. Also checking the original hard drive (which today wanted to spin for about 10 minutes) had the last traces of usage somewhere in 2015 and shows signs of being used sparsely in the previous ten years before. I was considering changing the thermal paste on the CPU, but it seems overly complicated and I’m afraid not to bork something up. The iMac is now opened, cleaned, and waiting for the upcoming upgrades:
- Storage: 960 GB SATA SSD (maybe I’ll even get a 2.5" to 3.5" caddy or adapter)
- RAM: bump from the current 512MB to 2GB
I know there’s a 2.5" HDD in the photos, it’s just provisional, because I’m thinking of ways to add the SSD without a caddy, because I forgot to order one and it will take me another few days to arrive. Later Edit: OK, I’m dumb, so when I forgot to order the caddy, it seems I also forgot to actually place the order for the SSD, so I placed it, along with the caddy, they just need to arrive.
Part Three
Woo, the SSD is here and of course the mounting bracket is retarded and the outer holes don’t match, so I still had to improvize a bit. I mean how fucking hard is it to drill three holes on the side of a bent metal sheet? Smh.
Anyhoot, I jammed the SSD inside, installed the MASSIVE TWO JIGGABYTES of RAM boom boom boom boom I started to install Mac OS Snow Leopard. An, by the way, I found out what was the rattling sound that came from the innards, it was of course a rogue cable being touched by a fan and going all BRRRRRRR.
The install process said it’s 30 minutes left and I started at 20:03, so until that’s done, it’s time to boot up a bit the 2006 MacBooks to check their installed RAM. The black one has 4GB of RAM (as I expected), and the white one had 3GB (as I remembered), so it got the extra stick of RAM. Until I realized that I’m dumb and I actually “upgraded” that MacBook from 3GB to 3GB (yes), the install on the iMac completed (in about 18 minutes).
I thought about migrating the install from the white MacBook to the iMac using the Migration Assistant application that comes bundled with Mac OSX, but I decided to keep this vanilla (for now).
The first step was to copy some music, and because I had some networking issues (for some reason it only connects at 54Mbit/s even on the 5GHz network), so I had to copy stuff using a spare HDD I had left over from opening a Nokia Booklet 3G and an USB adapter. If it sounds stupid but it works, then it’s not stupid!
So while copying about 80GB of music is going to take a while, I started to gather some apps that I’ve used on previous systems (like the 2006 MacBook or the 2011 MacBook Air). And while these are copying as well, I went to the Macintosh Garden to download some games. I will describe each in particular in a section below, once everything is completed and works.
Part Four: Downfall
While installing a game, it seems the computer just stopped and now it doesn’t go past the gray boot screen (not even showing the Apple logo). Letting it chill for a couple of minutes and cold booting seems to have fixed the issue, but I definitely need to check the temperatures.
Apparently, I can’t test the temperatures, because it seems that I’m unable to even extract the files, access to the disk drive getting lost about 20 seconds after logging in. So I opened the thing (again!) and tested a working SATA cable and the results were the same. I tested again all the three drives (original 160GB HDD, replacement 750GB HDD and 1TB SSD) using an external caddy and the drives themselves are in perfect working order.
So without further ado, I know the issue is beyond my comprehension and beyond my skills and available tools, so it will go into storage for now and I will most likely give it to a friend who can use it for spares or fix it himself. I restored the unit to its original specs, putting back in the 160GB hard drive and 512 MB stick of RAM.
In conclusion, I don’t mind spending some money in trying to upgrade this, as the components I got can (and will) be used in different projects, I am sad though, because I was planning to keep this computer in my living room for music when my friends gathered, but I guess I’ll have to use something else.
