Raymond Rinaldi

The most nerve wracking part of this repair was having both adhesive strips break off. I had heated the iOpener for 30 seconds and let it sit under the phone for 15 minutes before I started taking the phone apart but I guess the adhesive cooled off by the time I got to this step. I reheated the iOpener for another 30 seconds and let the phone sit on top of it all the while I retried to take off the adhesive. A bit hard because you have to hold the phone in place while working ( a two handed operation ) and I had to keep an eye on the display cable because I left it connected. I was able to retrieve the ends of the broken adhesive by gently prying up the corners of the battery with the plastic opening picks, then reaching underneath with tweezers to pull the broken ends out ( I could not see them directly but could feel when I grabbed one with the tweezers. ) Once I was able to grab even a little piece of adhesive in my fingers I was able to restart taking them off successfully. The iOpener was a lifesaver.

Reattaching the battery connector was one of the more difficult parts of this repair. Once you place the battery on the rear cover and the adhesive sticks you cannot make any adjustments to position (even though I tried to just place it as lightly as possible at first). I did a dry run attaching the connector and placing the battery before removing the adhesive cover but I did not get it to sit the quite the same after removing the cover. I had to fiddle with the battery connector quite a bit to get it in place.

Opening my iPhone 6 was so easy using the iSchlack. Well worth it.

iFixit is a lifesaver again. I consider the physical swapping of the hard drive to have been very easy actually. The only thing I had to do different was to use Carbon Copy Cloner instead of SuperDuper! to clone my old hard drive. I had been getting warnings about my hard drive from Tech Tool Pro so I decided to replace it before it failed altogether. I tried twice to clone the drive with SuperDuper! only to have the process fail in the end after running 6 hours. Because my hard drive had some bad sectors and one bad file, SuperDuper would not complete the cloning. Carbon Copy Cloner however easily identified the bad file, showed where it was located, allowed me to delete it and completed making a bootable hard drive. The deleted file could be restored later from a Time Machine backup.

Be sure the three plastic tabs on the bottom of the black front cover are inserted fully when you snap the cover back into place or else you will get a message saying the ink door is not closed.

I skipped the step about disconnecting the speaker cable. No problem.

I removed the battery cable for the repair. When I plugged in the MagSafe adapter after the repair, the Mac turned on automatically without pressing the power button and I was a bit worried, but after a restart everything worked fine again. I did have to reset date and time in Preferences. The battery was recognized OK.