Hmm, been a while since I posted here. Well, back to fun stuff.

My family (minus my dad and I) use a PowerPC Mac mini for their computing needs. It’s been going fine for 3.5 years now, but it’s been getting a bit slow, and the 80GB hard drive is running out of space. I convinced my dad that a hard drive upgrade might help with the speed, and would definitely give my mom more space to store photos. We ordered a 160GB drive from Newegg (this one), so a 2x increase in space would be seen.

Sidenote: PowerPC Macs are fine machines, and while this one may just be 1.5GHz, it has performance closer to a 2GHz Pentium 4 or something. Nothing amazing, but pretty good. It handles 4 users on a daily basis, each logged in with Fast User Switching. The discrete GPU means it can handle games decently well, and the only thing I wish was better (well, I wish it all was better, but this is the biggie) was the RAM. 1GB is too tight for 4 people to use.

There used to be a couple of guides online on how to upgrade the HD in PPC minis, but they seem to have been taken down over the years. I did find a video guide on the Other World Computing site, but it didn’t cover what to do for the antennas, so I decided to play it by ear for those.

To replace the hard drive, you’ll need a very thin putty knife, and P0 and  P1 size screwdriver. The P1 will need to have a long, thin shaft (3 inches should do it) as it needs to reach through a hole to a screw. Hardware wise, you’ll need a PPC Mac mini, a new hard drive, and an external, 2.5″ IDE hard drive enclosure. I got a cheap enclosure at my friendly neighborhood Microcenter, and a new putty knife at Home depot, so I’m ready to go.

There are two ways to transfer your data from the old drive to the new one. You can pop the new hard drive in the enclosure, and use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the drive before you swap the hard drives, or you can do it afterwards with some fancy magic. I was impatient and took out the old drive before the new one had arrived (which it did later that day), so the second option was the way I went.

To open the mini, first flip it over so the white plastic is face down on a hard surface.

Then, slip the putty knife in between the plastic and the aluminum outer case…

…and then bend the knife out. The clips on that side should pop out, and that side of the base will pop up.

Now slide the putty knife into the other side. This will take a lot more force, as there’s not a lot of clearance now. I find it helpful to make the tip of the knife thinner by sanding it down. Repeat the process on this side.

Now pull the base up. You may need to use the putty knife to lever the base up more. Now you have the actual computer. Put the shell aside for now, we don’t need to touch it. Also, now is a good time to start blowing the dust out of the crevices, as this machine probably hasn’t been opened in years. The two metallic plates are the antennas for Bluetooth and Airport. If you don’t have them, skip the next 2 steps. To remove the antenna closer to the rear, just pull up on the rearmost part of the antenna, and the rest of the antenna will come off the clip holding it.

The next one is a bit more delicate. Loosen (not remove) the screw on the left hand side of the drive sled towards the front. The antenna is now able to be slid up.

Now we need to remove the drive sled. There are three screws you need to unscrew. Note, all of the screws in here, except for the 4 holding the actual hard drive, are P0 size, so use the appropriate screwdriver.

Now gently lift the drive sled up. You need to pull the drive interface board from the motherboard. If you have the antennas, thread them through the hole while you’re removing the sled.

Next, remove the optical drive. There are 6 screws, 2 each on the 3 sides that don’t have a large, disc sized whole in them.



Now gently slide the optical drive forward with one hand while holding the interface board with your other.Put the drive and it’s screws in a safe place.

Now, remove then fan. I’ve heard there can be either 2 or 3 screws holding it in. Mine had 3. Just let the fan flap around, you just needed it out of the way of a screw.

Now remove the 4 screws holding the hard drive in. These are the P1 sized ones. There are 2 on this side…

..and 2 on this side. The first is where the fan was and the other is accessed by sticking a screwdriver through a hole to access it. You should remove the kynar tape, but I forgot about it and just punched through it.

Now separate the hard drive from the interface board.

Now put the new drive on the interface board, and screw it back in.

Put the fan back.

And the optical drive

Replace the drive sled, making sure to thread the antennas back in if you have them.

To replace the rear antenna, just clip it back on. The front one is a bit trickier. First, loosen the screw it needs, then slide the metal clips into the grooves for them in between the drive sled and the optical drive.

Now put the shell back on. Make sure the antenna wires are tucked safely away inside the case. position the shell on top of the base, and then press down on it evenly, making sure not to have one side drop too much more than the other. Also watch out for the metal shielding on the back, it might get caught, and that would be bad.

Now install the old drive into your enclosure. This is a pretty cheap one, but follow the instructions that came with it.

Now you can transfer the old data over (if you haven’t before). If you have a Firewire external drive, you can boot off of it and use Carbon Copy Cloner to transfer the data over. If you have a USB external drive, you need another computer. Connect the old drive to the other computer with USB, and then connect the mini to the extra computer with a Firewire 400 cable. Make sure the extra computer is booted up. Now press the minis power button, and hold down the ‘T’ key on a keyboard attached to the mini. THis boots it into Firewire Target Disk Mode, allowing the extra computer to access the hard drive inside of it over Firewire. A message may pop up saying the disk is unreadable, this is normal, select “Initialize…”. If it doesn’t pop up, open up Disk Utility and format the drive as “Mac OS Extended (journaled)”. Now you can clone the data using Carbon Copy Cloner. It took a bit over 2 hours to transfer ~70GB of data, so go take a nap or something while you wait. When it’s done, your mini will be able to boot off of the new drive. Now find some use for a smallish external drive.


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