Two laptops broke -- two laptops fixed!

[giza]

I had a fun afternoon yesterday. A friend of mine who owns a certain office supply store in town asked me if I could take a look at two of his laptops which had become unusable.

The first laptop was from Gateway. The hard drive wasn't just not responding, but it didn't even show up in the BIOS. So I flipped over the laptop and opened up the access port on the bottom. I was rather surprised to see that the hard drive, an IBM Travelstar, NOT physically attached to its connector. It was just floating "free" in the compartment, with about a quarter inch of clearance on the side and the bottom where it could move around freely. Definitely not good.

So I improvised by rolling up some paper and using it to pad the bottom of the drive as well as the side, and plugged it back in. Ran some tests courtesy of the the Ultimate Boot CD, and the hard drive works perfectly. I installed Ubuntu Linux on it and set that laptop aside.

The other laptop, a Compaq, was a little stranger. Despite there being a charge on the battery and confirming that the AC cable worked (it powered the Gateway laptop just fine), the system would not respond when I pushed the power button. The initial report from the owner was that it just lost power while he was in the middle of using it, and was unable to start the machine back up.

I did some poking around and discovered a reset button on the bottom of the unit. I unfolded a paperclip, pressed the button, then turned the machine over and tried hitting the power button again. Success! The machine booted up and behaved normally. I tried several reboots, suspends, and hibernations, and did not have any problems. I don't know exactly what the reset button does, but my guess would be that it does the equivalent of resetting the PMU on Apple's laptops.

So, that was a fun afternoon. Then I went out and drank with a bunch of vets, which was fun too. :-)

Comments

[omnibahumut.livejournal.com]

Was the Gateway HD the one that came with the laptop?

[giza.livejournal.com]

Not sure. It /could/ have been an upgrade gone horribly wrong, which would also be amusing.

[omnibahumut.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I can't imagine a manufacturer selling laptops with HDs that don't actually fit into the bay. In fact, I thought laptop Hard Drives were standardized so they always fit... maybe there was some other peice that got lost when they installed a new HD that was supposed to hold it in place.

[giza.livejournal.com]

> Yeah, I can't imagine a manufacturer selling laptops with HDs that don't
> actually fit into the bay.

Never done business with Packard Bell, have you? :-)

> In fact, I thought laptop Hard Drives were standardized

Not to my knowledge.

[omnibahumut.livejournal.com]

Never done business with Packard Bell, have you? :-) Hey, my first PC was a Packard Bell!

Not to my knowledge. I could be wrong, its not something I know much about. I've heard 'laptop hard drive' tossed around, and I assumed that since (I'm fairly certain anyway) that all PC HDs are the same physical size, that laptops would be same, for replacements or upgrades.

[wildw0lf.livejournal.com]

The Ultimate Boot CD is a great tool, I use that all the time. One of the best ones on there is the IBM Drive Fitness Test, which will test just about any hard drive, even one not made by IBM/Hitachi...great for testing Notebook hard drives...