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?
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?
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.
Thanks
Bob Cochran
Greenbelt, Maryland, USA
