You down with OCLP? Yeah you know me...

[phunguss]

I came into possession of a dozen or more old iMacs for parts... craigslist garage sale needed clearing out. Most had screens removed (available, just not installed), no ram or hard drives. Out of the lot of 19 iMacs, only 2 good pieces of cover glass (one 24" and one 21"), the rest were either cracked and taped, or completely missing.

So to make any of these useful, I need to reassemble and test everything. Some dead power supplies and inverter boards... still have to test all the screens...

In preparation to validate all the GPUs, I thought I better load up some MacOSs on a drive so I can try some benchmarks.

Here goes OCLP, just using a simple default of iMac12,1 (in a 2011 21" iMac), I was able to install 14 working versions of MacOS from 10.6.8 up to Sonoma 14. THANKS OCLP !!!!

Edit: Leopard 10.5 is a clone from a working imac4,1 but it does not boot on a 2011 iMac.... yet.

 

[phunguss]

I am finally getting around to cleaning out this hoard. Lots of dead/unknown video cards, so I picked a dented/stripped case to become a test station.

I marked the outline of the majority of the video card and heat pipe, noting the 21 inch as well.

Then I drilled pilot holes from the inside so I could mark the path on the outside. I have access to a plasma cutter, but I did not want to damage all the internal plastics and ended up using a jigsaw.

Connect the dots

and cutout

added a hinge with some pop-rivets

And now I have a test bed for any video cards I have removed. Easy access, no more removing the cover glass, LCD, and entire motherboard to test an MXM video card.

It is still tricky getting to the thermal sensor plug, but much easier than a motherboard removal.

 

[trs96]

That is some serious Mac Hacking. Nice work.