Old 20" intel iMac fried, still usable as external monitor?

[Alaskanmac]

So my older 20" intel Aluminum iMac finally appears to have fried it's hard drive as I can no longer get it to boot into Leopard or Windows Vista. I do thankfully have a brand new macbook pro that I love, other than the smaller screen size.


Would it be possible to buy one of Belkin's Mini Displayport to minidisplay port cable and try to use the iMac as an external monitor? Does the iMac's hard drive have to even be usable for this to work?

 

[robbieduncan]

Only the current and previous generation 27" iMacs can be used like this. The port on your iMac is output only.

 

[flopticalcube]

Although you can't use your iMac as a display, you can boot off of a USB or FW drive.

 

[Hellhammer]

Only the 27" iMac can be used as external monitors. A new hard drive costs roughly 50 bucks, so why not to get one? Apple can switch it for about 200$, definitely worth it as it's still working computer

 

[Alaskanmac]

To be honest, fixing my iMac wasn't a huge priority for me right now. I leave for college in about a month and I wasn't planning on shipping my iMac back and forth between here and college.

So on to my second question. I have a small 22" Sylvania TV that I was planning on carrying to college. What cables would I need to route my MBP to this TV? Would a simple Mini Displayport to HDMI + an HDMI cable work?

 

[Hellhammer]

To be honest, fixing my iMac wasn't a huge priority for me right now. I leave for college in about a month and I wasn't planning on shipping my iMac back and forth between here and college.

So on to my second question. I have a small 22" Sylvania TV that I was planning on carrying to college. What cables would I need to route my MBP to this TV? Would a simple Mini Displayport to HDMI + an HDMI cable work?

Yes. If you have the 2010 MBP, you don't need separate audio cable but if you have older MBP, you need something to carry the audio