Upgrading the Hard drive of an early 2008 iMac with a Macbook SSD

Recently I was given a water damaged Macbook Pro Retina, a beautiful machine that sadly no longer works...

My first thoughts with the Laptop were to remove the screen and turn it into an identical monitor for my own Retina Macbook Pro. This seemed favourable as someone from Russia (I think) is creating a small number of LCD controllers specifically for the panel inside a retina Macbook pro. I am still sitting on that idea as the controller will come close to $200 Au (which isn't bad) but for a little bit more i can pick up a larger monitor that will serve me better. So with that idea put on hold I had to think of what to do with the SSD which may or may not still work.

Now onto the iMac

Yesterday my $30 ebay adapter arrived. It is an 18+8pins Macbook pro/ Air SSD to sata adapter which surprisingly worked flawlessly. At the time I didn't have an enclosure for it to use externally so I got out the old family iMac that had recently died due to a suspected HD failure.
After 20 minutes of dismantling I had the new adapter installed in place of the monstrous 3.5inch drive.  With a press of the power button the iMac made its signature boot sound and the fan whirled up to full speed, their was however no picture...
Within a few seconds I realised i didn't plug in the display cable and LCD temp sensor (hence the fan) which was a seriously dumb move.

Currently the iMac works amazingly, speedy boot times make it a pleasure to use. Overall the machine starts up in just under 30 seconds and a little over a minute once you log on. The LCD however does have an ominous  yellow tinge which is unnoticeable when watching shows so I doubt I will bother to replace it. At the current time the SSD will stay put but I do plan on switching in a regular 2.5inch drive as the Macbook SSD is definitely a bit more valuable.

I am pleasantly surprised at the performance of this 7 year old iMac, with a 2.8ghz intel core duo, 2gb (-_-) of ram, an ATI radeon HD 2600 pro and  now a 256gb SSD.  The iMac definitely does its job as a now repurposed media and browsing computer.

I will continue these posts as I tinker with computers and mobile devices.

All tutorials I used were on ifixit.com which is the first place I look when dismantling or fixing a device.