Daily Archives: July 4, 2019

Replacing a 27″ iMac Hard Drive

I picked up a gorgeous 27″ iMac at the last UAA Surplus sale. But the fans run. A lot. I think someone put a new hard drive in it without considering how Apple makes everything as hard as it can possibly be.

Here’s some details on the problem. Apple has its own way of sensing the temperature on the hard drive. Because of course they do. And unless you get an Apple branded hard drive, or want to short the pins on Apple’s HD cable, you have to get a thermal sensor cable from OWC. It only costs $40, plus another $10 to ship to Alaska. (Or you could check first, like I should have, and find out it’s cheaper on Amazon, and you get free Prime shipping too. Sigh.)

Sigh. But! If get it working properly again … I’m telling you, this machine is gorgeous:

The dim monitor on the left is a perfectly adequate HD display from Dell.

Linux on Old Macs

I was recently given a second 20″ iMac 2007 to go along with the first. They’re beautiful machines, but Apple doesn’t want me to keep using it, so they’re making all their software not work on it anymore. So I’ve been wondering how they’d do as Linux machines.

Apparently, it isn’t very easy to get an old iMac to boot a Linux system. I don’t think I have a Firewire cable, much less a HDD enclosure with a Firewire interface.