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" http://www.scaled.com/projects/tierone/ http://kinz.org http://www.fedoratracker.org http://www.fedorafaq.org http://www.fedoranews.org Jeff Kinz, Emergent Research, Hudson, MA.
