Bent Pins, Lost Screws

[James McKenzie]

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?
> 
> 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?
> 
Carefully straighten the pins with a set of STRAIGHT needle nose pliers 
with a soft touch.

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