iMac Repair

It’s always a slightly nervous operation when my iMac needs opening up, but on return from my holiday it wouldn’t boot and everything was pointing toward the SSD I’d installed when I first got my 2011 iMac.

I ordered a replacement on Amazon which arrived the next day. It’s hard to believe that I got a SSD with twice the capacity (1000GB) as the one I installed in 2012, for a third of the price (only £116!)

During that time, I’d actually managed to get the system to boot, although it was running incredibly hot and seemed a little erratic. I did manage to use Carbon Copy Cloner to create a bootable copy of the internal SSD to the new externally connected SSD, so was happy from a data perspective. I also have several copies of the data, so data loss wasn’t the main concern. I was simply hoping to save some time and not have to reinstall macOS and all the Applications I use.

My first step with anything like this is the ifixit website. Their guides are excellent and provide step-by-step instructions, and offer a certain level of comfort when opening up something like this. I’d describe myself as fairly competent when it comes to PC repairs and have built several of my own, but Apple stuff is a completely different ball game.

All that said, it was a pretty painless process. I found the stuff I’d used originally in a box in the garage, and once the screen was removed, replacing the SSD was simply a case of removing the 4 optical drive screws and switching over the drives.

The machine booted the first time, and after shutting down, cleaning everything up, and rebooting I was back up and running with the 1TB drive and a spare, although possibly faulty, 512GB one.

My iMac is now 7 years old, although still does what I need it for pretty admirably. It helps having the SSD boot disk, and an upgraded 2TB HDD, along with 32GB of RAM, but I’m hoping it will last me another few years before it needs replacing.