Mac Attack (Mods to make an eMac "bench-friendly")

As Apple's marketing team just seems to keep getting better at what they do, Macs are simply becoming too popular not to service.

As a computer technician, I come across this fact on an almost daily basis now. The demand for Mac repairs and data recovery has dramatically increased. The tech bench, however, has not yet become Mac-savvy. What do I mean? Lets get a little technical:

Macs love to be different in EVERY way possible. Many will argue that this is what makes them so appealing. One of such ways is Macs HFS/HFS+ file system. In leyman's terms, the way that files are saved and managed on a Macs hard drive is very different than that of a PC.


So to get back to the bench being "Mac Ready", this basically means you need an OS X based operating system installed on a computer which gives you access to it's innards. Given the budget for such a demand, I wanted to do something with what we already had: an eMac

Now to be honest, this is hardly an ideal Mac to mod, as it has been INCREDIBLY well engineered to fit entirely in what would usually have been only the monitor. This means a tight fit, many screws (approx. 300), hardly any "case" access to the system board, and to top it all off, a very dangerous high-voltage exposed Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) assembly.

With all of the aforementioned considered, I still proceeded to open up this contraption. The goal, essentially, is to provide external hard drive (IDE) and power connections thus allowing us to hot swap other hardware (ie. HFS/+ partitioned IDE/SATA hard drives, airport cards) more easily in order to diagnose/extract data.

Why not simply use a USB to IDE/SATA adapter you might ask?
The answer is simple: They are extremely unreliable (I've seen them damage hard drives), and USB transfering hogs CPU resources which could otherwise be used by the recovery program to do it's tasks, therefore slowing the entire process. This is the last thing you want happening on a rapidly failing hard drive.

After much thought, I decided the CD drive access bay was the best place to provide an exit for the data and power cables. With a few careful cuts, melts and a bit of patience, I tapped into the power and IDE channel originally dedicated to the eMac's internal hard drive, fed the cabling through the CD bay and pieced it all back together.

Voila! Never say never. You can always use what you have at your disposal, as long as you are open minded and bit creative...



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