
- #Apple mac mini 2012 hard drive replacement upgrade
- #Apple mac mini 2012 hard drive replacement Bluetooth
- #Apple mac mini 2012 hard drive replacement crack
You can plug everything in and test it before replacing the cover if you wish. You can now screw in the fan, black casing, DVD drive, and replace the wireless antennas if you have them. Screw in the hard drive, and your replacement is set. Be sure to align the pins correctly – the set of four pins, which are at the right side of the drive, do not need to be plugged in. Put your new drive in the old drive’s place. At this point you just need to work backwards. Remove them all, and the hard drive can be pulled away from the daughterboard. Remove them and the fan slides right out, giving you access to all the screws you will need to deal with to get that hard drive out.įour larger screws hold the hard drive in. There are four tiny screws holding it in place. The cooling fan is the easiest part to remove in this process. There is one more piece that needs to be removed before you can get to the drive.

Once the screws are removed, you can lift out the casing. There are three screws holding his housing in place, which are all located in corners. Unclipping them from the casing is a snap, and the wiring is durable. They do look sensitive, but do not worry.
#Apple mac mini 2012 hard drive replacement Bluetooth
Now, if you have Bluetooth and/or Airport Express built-in to your Mac, you will need to unclip the antennas so they do not get in the way. The next thing you need to do is remove the black housing from the motherboard itself. Lay the disc drive somewhere safe, and move on. You will notice that the hard drive is right underneath the drive, but it cannot be removed just yet. After the six screws are out, the drive is easily slipped out of the daughterboard. The two in back are the most difficult to get out unless you have a small, thin screwdriver. There are six screws in total holding it in place. The first think you want to do it remove the DVD drive. At this point it’s time to break out the small Phillips screwdriver.
#Apple mac mini 2012 hard drive replacement crack
The crack is bad.Īfter popping the two sides and the front, you can lift the innards of the mini away from the cover.

Do note that a pop and a crack are two different things. Push it down until it stops, and then push firmly towards the center of the mini. Now shove it between the white plastic and the metal casing. As noted in multiple places elsewhere, time to get out the putty knife. Looking at the underside of the computer, it becomes obvious that there is no simple way to open it up. So, to get started you are going to need to disconnect everything and turn your Mac mini upside down. Once everything is backed up to the iPod, you are good to go as far as proceeding with the upgrade. Start Backup, and select everything you want to save. The iPod will now act as an external hard drive. Once the iPod reboots, hold down the Select and Play/Pause buttons to enable Target Disk Mode. The easiest way to do this is to reset the iPod, holding the Select and Menu buttons. The first thing I did was back up everything to the iPod photo.
#Apple mac mini 2012 hard drive replacement upgrade
If you want to upgrade your Mac mini’s hard drive, read on for our tutorial which takes a look at backing up your data, replacing your hard drive, and restoring your data. Rather than taking it in to a service center where they would overcharge me, I did it on my own. It was time to upgrade to a 5400 RPM 100 GB drive. The mini had half a gig of RAM in it, but the 4200-RPM drive was just holding me back. The 80 GB version struck my fancy, but soon I realized that I am not one that enjoys playing mouse cursor beach ball all that much.

So much so that I had to pick up a Mac mini so that I would have a desktop Mac solution (and because it just calls your name when shopping at the Apple Store). Recently I picked up a PowerBook, and while I expected it to be “okay”, I did not expect to fall in love with OS X the way that I have.
