Bent Pins, Lost Screws
Jeff Kinz
jkinz at kinz.org
Fri Feb 4 03:17:39 UTC 2005
On Thu, Feb 03, 2005 at 10:08:15PM -0500, Robert L Cochran wrote:
> When I installed a new hard drive in my aging Sony Vaio PCG-F350 laptop
> this evening, two tragedies befell me. The worst...shudder!...is that I
> fumbled one of the 3 mounting screws for the hard drive cage on the
> motherboard, and I can't find the darn screw. It's somewhere in the guts
> of the laptop, possibly around the region of the touch pad. So far, the
> motherboard hasn't shorted out or shown strange problems. But the hard
> drive light stays on all the time now -- unusual -- and I had to turn
> off acpi in the 667 kernel. Can anyone suggest how to find a screw
> dropped in a laptop's motherboard area?
Keep the power off!
I suggest continued shaking interspersed with further dis-assembly of
the laptop until you find the screw or go mad (whichever comes first).
I wouldn't power the unit back up until I had the screw out. It could
be very costly.
Start with lots of shaking, all directions, all orientations, until you
get a rattle, then try to maneuver the little bugger to an opening.
>
> The second problem is that when I removed the IDE connector from the old
> hard drive, I bent 2 of the pins on the old drive. But not too badly. I
> was able to bend one pin back with a jeweler's screwdriver and might be
> able to bend them both back with a needle nose pliers. This is a 6 Gb
> IBM Travelstar drive. Is there a better way to straighten hard drive pins?
Nope, but if you are very careful that will work fine.
>
> Sony did not make removing a hard drive easy to do with the Vaio
> notebooks in this series. You have to remove the keyboard and then
> unscrew the drive cage from the motherboard.
Many laptops are similarly difficult. Good Luck.
--
Linux/Open Source: Your infrastructure belongs to you, free, forever.
Idealism: "Realism applied over a longer time period"
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Jeff Kinz, Emergent Research, Hudson, MA.
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