Late 2009 - Starting the Mod Journey

[thainglo]

This site is amazing! I rescued a late 2009 27" last week and bringing it back to life. Have installed an SSD as the original hard drive was missing. It first show no signs of life other than a boot chime, so i removed the 4850 GPU and baked it. With a boot USB and my 2011 Mac Mini (also a new acquisition) I was able to be High Sierra up and running. Felt like a genius!

Computer ran for an hour or so, then the screen started to go immediately black. No dimming, sometimes a bit of flickering (but not often), then totally out. No image visible with a flashlight. Hard to tell if it is a panel or GPU issue - when panel goes dark, the #4 LED goes out. I have a mini-DP to HDMI adapter that should be here soon, that will help.

Ordered a new AMD m6100 card today, same that is in my trusty Dell m6800 workstation laptop. Been reading TONS from the upgrade thread, has me excited to start. It looks like the AMD route might be a bit more complicated than the Nvidia setup, but I couldn't stomach the cost of those cards, given the age of them.

If anyone has any pointers, I'll be glad to hear them!

 

[Nguyen Duc Hieu]

My iMac 2009 has been laid over for more than 4 months now.
During the process of disassembly, the V-sync cable was damage.
I had to order replacement from China, the package took 3 months to reach me.

Meanwhile, the M6100 was already flashed.
I'm just too lazy to open the machine again to take out the SSD and do the EFI modification with OCLP.

May this thread help spank my lazy ass to get the iMac working again and new Mac OS installed.

Cheers!

 

[thainglo]

Can you provide some detail of the EFI modification to your SSD? I have read that some additional steps need to be taken with the AMD cards but haven't been able to locate any hard info yet.

What happened to your iMac with the bad vsync cable? The end of mine had bad connectors on it, the pins had come loose from the backing and were folding over. I snipped the end of and gently scraped off a few mms to expose to copper lines. Now seems to work fine. The longest I had the screen running before it went black (4 hours) was with the vsync cable disconnected.

 

[Nguyen Duc Hieu]

Can you provide some detail of the EFI modification to your SSD? I have read that some additional steps need to be taken with the AMD cards but haven't been able to locate any hard info yet.

What happened to your iMac with the bad vsync cable? The end of mine had bad connectors on it, the pins had come loose from the backing and were folding over. I snipped the end of and gently scraped off a few mms to expose to copper lines. Now seems to work fine. The longest I had the screen running before it went black (4 hours) was with the vsync cable disconnected.

EFI modification: Read post #1. The guide is already there.
I don't know what would happen when the V-sync cable is not connect. I haven't powered it on since then.
Others said that it wouldn't impact much without the V-sync cable.

 

[thainglo]

Had the iMac powered up a bit yesterday to start some pre-work on the GPU swap. Screen/file sharing, remote login, etc. With brightness dimmed quite a bit, it stayed running. Will keep limping along while waiting for parts to arrive.

 

[pshufd]

You can buy the Core 2 Duo models for $50 - $75 used if you need parts.

 

[thainglo]

Thanks, good idea to keep in mind. My m6100 is arriving today, so I have the logic board out again in preparation. This iMac was missing the cable that connects the logic board to the headphone and microphone jacks on the back. I found out that if that cable is missing, the internal speakers are not found, so no sound. That part arrived Saturday, so I was able to tuck it in and discover the speakers work.

In more evidence this machine is finding ways to punch me in the face at every turn, the DVD drive refused to accept a CD. Would just click several times, then stop. Figuring I had the screen off for the audio cable, I'd pull the DVD and see if there was something jammed in the mechanism. What I found was a bent tab that is meant to pull in the disk to the location. Figured out how to remove the plastic cover and bent the tab back into position. It is pretty strong metal, not like tin at all. Would have taken a lot of force and deliberate effort to bend that thing back!

Feeling pretty smart, after flattening the tab and reassembled the drive, I reinstalled it and booted up the iMac. It smoothly grabbed my CD (OCLP Recovery Disk to test if I could use for boot). Read the disk fine, the EFI image showing up on the desktop. I'll admit it, I did a little happy dance.

Booted up the machine, holding down the "C" key. iMac did not boot from the CD, I'd made an error when creating the files. No problem, easy to make a new one. Tell the iMac to eject the CD - click click click... Won't eject the disk, just makes the sound, then pulls it back in to read it again. Pow! Right to the old kisser.

Have one on order for later this week. Less than $7, so not breaking the bank and I was entertained by how much of a fight this old gal is putting up!

 

[thainglo]

The machine is all done! Replacement DVD drive arrived arrived yesterday and worked flawlessly. I burnt a new recovery CD while in High Sierra, then proceeded to update straight to Monterrey. Went smoothly, no surprises - first time for that on this project!

Biggest issue I had overall on this upgrade was wrapping my head around the OCLP launch process. Once I figured out that I just needed to burn a working OpenCore EFI to my internal hard drive and boot up the machine, I could see the iMac would do the rest. Flashed the revised vBios for my m6100 card using the GRML USB stick - that has to be one of the coolest things I've seen in awhile! Controlling the iMac without a screen from a different computer in another room and flashing the graphics card - WOW!

Then, it was just reassembly. The iMac booted up fine and since I included Verbose in my settings, I could watch as it made progress through the booting stages. If I just had a blank screen to watch, I'd be terrified that it had gotten hung up during boot. After confirming High Sierra was working, I created a new OpenCore with the graphics card and saved to my internal drive. Then, on to Monterey.

Took a lot of work, primarily from my own delays and concerns. Plus, at one point my GRML USB seemed to stop working as I could not get the ssh to connect. Erased and redid the USB stick and it worked fine. Smooth after that.

Typing this message out on the 2009 27" iMac now. Pretty slick!

Does anyone reading this know how to change the boot screen to the more modern dark screen? That is the last thing I'd like to accomplish.

 

[thainglo]

Feeling excited about completing the GPU and OS upgrades on my 2009 iMac, I decided to also increase the size of the SSD. I had initially used a spare 120gb drive that I had lying around - just in case the project crashed and burned, I hadn't gone to the expense of purchasing a larger SSD. With it up and running, I decided to install a 512GB that was being used in another project. (In hindsight, wish I would have just started with this drive instead!)

Turns out upsizing the SSD was a massive undertaking. I certainly could have been doing it wrong, but each step I took ended in the machine only booting from the Recovery CD (thank goodness I'd made that early on!). Fortunately, over the past weekend I had picked up a pair of 2011 iMacs for $100 - a 21.5" and 27". Both pretty basic with i5 processors, 4GB RAM, the factory 1TB HDD and HD 6770m graphics cards.

The only way I could get my system to work was to swap the working GPU and heatsink from the 2011 27" to the 2009 27". Once loading OpenCore, I could again create a bootable EFI on my larger SSD. I had installed Monterey on the 512GB drive and it worked great when booting from the CD, but could not create a bootable EFI partition on either an SSD or USB stick.

Now, I think I can put the wraps on this project. CPU is at the peak of an i7-870, GPU is AMD m6100 and the sole drive is a 512GB SSD. Typing this message out on it now. Whew!