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Replacement Hard Drive Compatibility

B

Big Alsie

macrumors member
Original poster
Apr 18, 2009
71
10
I have a late 2006 (white) 24 inch iMac 2.16 ghz with a 500 GB HDD currently in it. I am looking to swap the 500 GB out with the 2TB model listed below.

WD Caviar Black

WD2001FASS


I noticed that the 2TB model runs at SATA 3. Is this compatible with my machine? :confused: Please help!
 
For the record, if you plan on replacing the hard drive yourself, doing so is very difficult in an iMac. Be very clear of what you're getting into or get a genius to do it.
 
i've seen the process done a number of times and helped swap a drive or two in the 20 inch models as well. the only real complicated part is removing the tape that surrounds the screen and the place foil piece that shields the chin of the machine.
 
Update

So I swapped out the drives and now have 2TB of onboard storage. The process was actually easier then expected. My 24 inch didn't have the rediculous amounts of tape inside the case (maybe because it was BTO with HDD and Graphics Cards upgraded). it did however have 8 screws (4 on left and 4 on right) holding the screen in place. the swap was the easiest i have ever seen or done in an imac.

In short, if you have a mid-2007 (purchased mine in april or may of 2007) 24 inch iMac and are considering swapping in a new HDD. do it, it is painless.
:)
 
imac 24 inch drive replacement

help, i am having a hard time... have a 24 inch imac intel doucore 2 2.16 gig with a 250 gig hard drive. bought a 2 tb drive sata 6 and used jumper to slow down to 1.5 gig. on drive. used super duper and cloned drive, restarted machine with new drive connected as external and booted fine. When i put it in my imac as primary drive t gave me the folder and question mark. If i put in a dvd to load os from (wrong os by the way). it shows me the drive and it lets me format and check for errors. but will not boot of it. HELP PLEASE. is the sata 6 to high for my mac to handle? any help would be great. My imac is currently runing 10.6.8 but i do not have original disks that came with unit. Apple tells me my serial number came with os 10.4
 
bigtelvis said:
help, i am having a hard time... have a 24 inch imac intel doucore 2 2.16 gig with a 250 gig hard drive. bought a 2 tb drive sata 6 and used jumper to slow down to 1.5 gig. on drive. used super duper and cloned drive, restarted machine with new drive connected as external and booted fine. When i put it in my imac as primary drive t gave me the folder and question mark. If i put in a dvd to load os from (wrong os by the way). it shows me the drive and it lets me format and check for errors. but will not boot of it. HELP PLEASE. is the sata 6 to high for my mac to handle? any help would be great. My imac is currently runing 10.6.8 but i do not have original disks that came with unit. Apple tells me my serial number came with os 10.4
Click to expand...

When using the disc to open up disk utility, get information on the HDD and then make sure to double check whether or not the "ignore ownership" box is checked or not. If it is checked, then you won't be able to boot from it.

***EDIT*****

Instead of using disk utility, instead select the HDD icon and then select "get info." At the very bottom of the window, there will be a small checkbox that has "ignore ownership on this volume" next to it. First, unlock it by clocking on the lock icon, type in your password, deselect the checkbox, re-lock it and then try again.
 
Last edited:
alright, i will give it a try, i have my old drive in and hooked up the new one with usb adapter and sure enough , it was not checked. So i checked the ignore ownership and locked it again. I will give it a try and let you know. thanks
 
no good. did not boot. still folder with ?.

----------
RedCroissant said:
When using the disc to open up disk utility, get information on the HDD and then make sure to double check whether or not the "ignore ownership" box is checked or not. If it is checked, then you won't be able to boot from it.

***EDIT*****

Instead of using disk utility, instead select the HDD icon and then select "get info." At the very bottom of the window, there will be a small checkbox that has "ignore ownership on this volume" next to it. First, unlock it by clocking on the lock icon, type in your password, deselect the checkbox, re-lock it and then try again.
Click to expand...

did not work... how do i know if this drive is even compatable.??
 
bigtelvis said:
no good. did not boot. still folder with ?.

----------



did not work... how do i know if this drive is even compatable.??
Click to expand...

I'm surprised that didn't work. Here's a question, is your name or one of the administrator accounts listed in the box right above that checkbox? I had to manually add myself as a user with read/write privileges to make it work.

If you have the original installation disk, you could insert that to get to the startup disk selection and make sure the HDD you want is listed and selected. Or try pressing the "option" key when booting up to select it at that point.
 
dont have original disks. i dont see me as allowed... but it does boot off usb... shouldnt it follow suit in the imac
 
bigtelvis said:
dont have original disks. i dont see me as allowed... but it does boot off usb... shouldnt it follow suit in the imac
Click to expand...

Then if you don't see yourself listed on there, click on the "+" and add yourself to the list and give read/write permissions.
 
yeah it shows me. you know when i cloned it it only made it as big as my 250 gig drive. not what i had in mind.. so i reformated it. how can i get the right os to install on this . apple said it used tiger 10.4. will any tiger 10.4 os work?

also when i had the new drive in the imac. and the dvd in and restarted with c pressed it only showed my dvd. not the new drive.... will this drive work in my unit or do i need to buy a sata 2 drive....
 
bigtelvis said:
yeah it shows me. you know when i cloned it it only made it as big as my 250 gig drive. not what i had in mind.. so i reformated it. how can i get the right os to install on this . apple said it used tiger 10.4. will any tiger 10.4 os work?

also when i had the new drive in the imac. and the dvd in and restarted with c pressed it only showed my dvd. not the new drive.... will this drive work in my unit or do i need to buy a sata 2 drive....
Click to expand...

what do you mean it only made it as big as your 250 gig drive? Are you saying that the clone only formatted the new 2 TB HDD as only 250GB? That shouldn't happen.

Your iMac is an Intel machine and as such can run up to OS X Lion 10.7.5. So if you have OS X Tiger 10.4.11, OS X Leopard 10.5, or OS X Snow Leopard 10.6 on a disc, that should work to install on the machine to make sure it runs properly. You shouldn't have to start from the initial OS to get it running right.

The drive you bought(SATA III?) should work since SATA is backwards compatible with itself. I installed a 3TB SATA III drive when mine was originally SATA II(3 Gbps) and I have no problems.

And by the way, which application did you use to clone your HDD? And which format did you choose for the partition? Apple Partition Map(APM) is for PowerPC processors, and GUID is for Intel. So if you cloned your OS and used the APM formatting table, then it will never boot up your machine.
 
used superduper.

it made a 250 gig partition on my 2 tb drive. so it showed as a 2 tb drive with a 250 gig partition.

i formated it as mac extended journled. forgive spelling please

i just ordered the exact os dvds for my mac from love our macs .com

do i need to put jumper on drive or not?

and... did i format it correctly?

thanks

----------

can you tell me the seps you took to replace drive... not the mechanical ones. i could do those now in my sleep.

i dont care about loosing my apps . i can get them back.

i just want to know the propr way to cange drive.......that works.

thanks
 
bigtelvis said:
used superduper.

it made a 250 gig partition on my 2 tb drive. so it showed as a 2 tb drive with a 250 gig partition.

i formated it as mac extended journled. forgive spelling please

i just ordered the exact os dvds for my mac from love our macs .com

do i need to put jumper on drive or not?

and... did i format it correctly?

thanks

----------

can you tell me the seps you took to replace drive... not the mechanical ones. i could do those now in my sleep.

i dont care about loosing my apps . i can get them back.

i just want to know the propr way to cange drive.......that works.

thanks
Click to expand...

bigtelvis said:
by the way. the os i tried was 10.6.8 and it said it couldnt be put on this imac
Click to expand...

Well, I never use superduper. I rely heavily on Carbon Copy Cloner and love it. I have the last free version that they made and I made sure to save the .dmg as well so I will always have it available.

According to everymac.com, your computer should be able to run OS X 10.7.5, so Snow Leopard should have been accepted. If snow Leopard didn't work though, maybe your iMac is a PowerPC?

When I used CCC, I cloned my original 320 GB HDD to a 3TB seagate that Best Buy installed for me. I was able to clone it by putting my original drive into a HDD docking station made by Thermaltake and from there used CCC to clone the OS onto the new drive. I made sure that it was formatted MAC OS extended(journaled) and made sure that the formatting table used was GUID. After about 30 minutes(it's a USB 2.0) docking station, I had my iMac back up and running with the new 3TB drive and everything working exactly the way that it did on my 320GB HDD. I now use the 320 solely for my cloned OSes(Lion, Leopard, Tiger) I have two PowerPC Macs(17" iMac G5 and 12" iBook G4) in addition to my two intel iMacs that are from 2009 and 2010.

Basically, it was incredibly easy and you should not be having this much trouble wi getting it up and running.
 
OS X system requirements

System requirements for OS X Lion and Mac OS X v10.6
Summary
Learn the system requirements for OS X Lion and Mac OS X v10.6.

Products Affected
Mac OS X 10.6, OS X Lion

OS X Lion system requirements

To use Lion, make sure your computer has the following:

An Intel Core 2 Duo, Core i3, Core i5, Core i7, or Xeon processor
Mac OS X v10.6.6 or later to install via the Mac App Store (v10.6.8 recommended); you can install without Mac OS X v10.6 by using an OS X Lion USB Thumb Drive, available on the Apple Online Store
7 GB of available disk space
2 GB of RAM
If your Mac does not meet these requirements, you will need to upgrade your Mac before installing Lion.


Mac OS X v10.6 Snow Leopard system requirements

To install Snow Leopard for the first time, you must have a Mac with:

An Intel processor
An internal or external DVD drive, or DVD or CD Sharing
At least 1 GB of RAM (additional RAM is recommended)
A built-in display or a display connected to an Apple-supplied video card supported by your computer
At least 5 GB of disk space available, or 7 GB of disk space if you install the developer tools


I got this from Apple's support site and your machine meets these requirements, so I am confused as to why 10.6.8 couldn't be installed unless there was a problem with the installation in the first place or if you happened to have a PowerPC only version of it(which I don't think even exists).
 
I've cloned drives using SuperDuper several times.

What I always do is to access the new disk via Disk Utility, then create a partition on that disk equal to the size of the disk, and make sure that it's a GUID partition.

Only then do I clone, and I've never had the issue you report.

I know it takes a long time, but I think you can solve your missing capacity problem by doing what I said.
 
hooked new drive to usb and got snow leperd to install on it. computer booted on that drive and it worked great. but when i put the drive in my imac it always gives me the folder with the question mark
 
bigtelvis said:
hooked new drive to usb and got snow leperd to install on it. computer booted on that drive and it worked great. but when i put the drive in my imac it always gives me the folder with the question mark
Click to expand...

I honestly don't know why it's doing that. Do you have another external or original drive that you could use to boot from and then reformat the new WD drive while it's in the machine to make it bootable?

I disk utility, reformat it to Mac OS extended journaled, and there's a button that says "options" on it which allows you to choose that partition scheme(which is where you should make sure GUID is selected). Be sure ownership is enabled on the drive with your name or all administrator accounts, and then recline the OS onto that new drive.

Then still using the original drive to boot the machine, go into system preferences--->startup disk, then select the new drive. Shut down the machine and be sure to disconnect the original drive and see if that works.

If this continues to be a problem, contact WD support and see if there is an issue with that drive being used in your machine.
 
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