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?Carefully straighten the pins with a set of STRAIGHT needle nose pliers with a soft touch.
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?
Loosing a screw in any system can result in sudden failure of your system. I would not power up until I found that missing screw.
-- James McKenzie
