Bent Pins, Lost Screws

[Robert L Cochran]

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