Re: Bent Pins, Lost Screws

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

 



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.


[Index of Archives]     [Current Fedora Users]     [Fedora Desktop]     [Fedora SELinux]     [Yosemite News]     [Yosemite Photos]     [KDE Users]     [Fedora Tools]     [Fedora Docs]

  Powered by Linux