iMac 27″ SSD Upgrade

Hey everybody tonight we are working on an iMac A1418 21”. We will be doing an SSD upgrade, So, what we have to do is upgrade the HDD to an SSD. The computer has a double-sided foam tape that can be cut straight through the middle with a thin plastic tool that can be slid into the slit on the side of the screen with patience and repetition as you cut away the foam will start to come apart. I recommend to place a box under the screen so it won’t slip or fall and then the screen falls. Once it is apart there are 2 flex cables connecting the LCD to the board and carefully unclip them. On the bottom of the screen, there is a two-part tape holding the screen down which can be taken off by pulling on two pull tabs. After this, we had to clean the sides of the PC and the screen, take off as much of that foam tape as well. With the screen safely put aside, we can begin unmounting the hard drive. We disconnect the drive and unscrewed 4 screws holding brackets so it wouldn’t fall out of place then we pulled it out, it also has rubber covers on both sides as shock absorbers. When we went to connect the SSD it was much harder as the cable was tight so we loosened the speaker and pulled it up to be able to get more room to insert the drive, this took a while… We were able to connect the SSD and then put the shock absorbers back onto it. And secure it with the brackets. Then we placed the new tape that was cut out for the parts. From there we can place the screen back on and reconnect that flex cable and we held the screen with painters’ tape because we needed it to be held in place and not fall off before we tested it. Then using our MacOS install USB we installed MacOS Catalina first by heading into disk utility and formatting the drive to APFS for newer models, if you are installing an older OS from a USB check your date or else it will tell you that it is corrupt or wrong, the date for the download has to coincide with the computer for example High Sierra we have to change the computers date to 01/01/2019 through Terminal and type date and it will tell you or date (insert date here) and that will work, with Catalina we did not have that issue and it installed correctly. Once we had the drive and the OS installed and running well the last step is removing the pull tabs and finally sealing the Mac back up starting from the bottom of the screen to have it placed where it belongs and then the rest. And that’s what’s going on today at PC 911.