Bent Pins, Lost Screws

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On Thu, 3 Feb 2005 22:17:39 -0500, Jeff Kinz <jkinz at kinz.org> wrote:
> 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.
> 
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> 



I really liked this advise:
> > Start with lots of shaking, all directions, all orientations

I use this procedre a lot, acually. After the shower but before the
towel, this is great to remove most of the water from your body if all
you have is one of those little peach towels from the army. Also, when
I wake up at the keyboard, this seldom fails keep me alive for another
5 minutes (until the water boils for coffee). Lastly, this seems to be
the safest postion to be in at pantera and sepultura shows, though the
last I had been to one of those was 1998 or there abouts.

Dotan