Gently bend the Jimmy outwards to pry the crack open a little larger and lift the lower housing up a small amount.
There are several plastic clips on the lower housing that fit into a channel in the aluminum top housing. Your goal is to use the Jimmy to push these clips inward enough to free them from the channel, while gently pulling up on the lower housing.
Later in this guide you will remove several recessed Phillips screws. Bit drivers are generally too large to fit in the recesses, so be sure to have a thin shafted Phillips screwdriver on hand.
First remove the AirPort antenna (the larger of the two), located near the power button.
Slightly squeeze the two retaining arms toward each other and lift the AirPort antenna off its post.
Squeezing the two posts excessively will surely break them off the internal frame. Work delicately.
During reinstallation, you will have to slightly squeeze the two posts together so they fit into the openings on the AirPort antenna board.
Lift the audio board ribbon cable up out of its socket.
If it refuses to lift from its socket, the ZIF cable lock is not fully released. Make sure it is evenly lifted about 1 mm from the socket on the interconnect board.
In the next few steps, you will remove the four Phillips screws securing the internal frame to the bottom case. Included in each step is an overview picture showing the general location and a closeup showing the actual screw.
Remove the recessed Phillips screw near the power button securing the internal frame to the bottom housing.
Is there any drivers or anything that needs to be done on the Mac itself to install this hard drive? Can you use this hard drive to install applications onto as well?
Here's something important to be aware of. DVD Player will not function without a physical dvd drive installed. This is even if you use DVD image files, which I do. The explanation I got is that without that optical drive DVD Player can't check regions. If you want to watch DVDs on your mac mini, even DVD image files, don't remove the optical drive.
although my optical bay hard drive enclosure did not use or have the bracket shown above with two Phillips #0 screws. And the hard drive had a different attachment system. The screws did not come in from the bottom. They came in from the side....no matter still a great solution.