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Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Hardware problems just arn’t my thing

So the Dell guy arrives. In and out in 40mins. Doesn’t do any checking of his on. Just comes in with the new motherboard and procedes to take my laptop apart.
The first time he turned it on I instantly new that it was working ’cause the hard drive light be flashing. Check the bios (were he has to re-enter the service number) and the bios reports the hard disk is installed. The thing booted, but I screwed with the logical volume (so I had to fix that later).

I like software, I can fix the problem (most of the time).

-= Comments
1. Zooba | January 29th, 2008 at 5:58 pm
It’s probably cheaper to replace 10 motherboards a day than to diagnose and possibly fix 2-4 issues. (Especially when you consider the difference in the training required)

Saturday, January 26, 2008

Hang on, Dell is on its way

To alleviate the problebm of a laptop that won’t boot because it doesn’t think it has a HDD, I called Dell since I have 180 odd days of Next Business Day on-site cover.

They’ll be here on Tuesday or Wednesday with a new motherboard. Hazaar.

Thursday, January 24, 2008

Somedays, I just hate computers

So I wanted to resume my 64bit laptop from suspend today and check out a few things.
I’ve had a problem with wireless resuming from suspend but it has never really worried me because I can restart a few services and all is well again.
Except today.
I ran the script twice and there was no sign of life from the wifi light. So I rebooted.
My laptop decided it was not going to pick up the hard disk. It didn’t consider it to be present. Like it had packed it's things and left for the day.
Gar.
So my first goal was to work out if the disk is ok. I plug it into my external IDE/SATA enclosure (and for all who want to know, SATA in a laptop is the same as SATA in a desktop) and check the disk. At first I thought there was a problem, but I had forgot to plug the other end of the USB connection in. Disk is fine.

Since I have two similar laptop models (A Dell M1710 causing me problems and Dell Inspiron 9400 running fine currently), I thought I would take the HDD out of the 64bit model and try it in the 32bit model. It detected the harddisk but wouldn’t boot (stating that you can’t run a 64bit os on a 32bit machine). Cool
Tried the other way around, take the disk out of the 32bit machine (which had already been done thanks to previous test) and place it in 64bit machine. Turn it on and it still doesn’t like the disk.

I have tried some cardboard “modifications” to see if I could lift the disk slightly up or down to see if it was just a connector problem, but I haven’t had much luck there. I’m not prepared to put too much in there in case it gets stuck.

Tried compressed air down the HDD bay to see if I could dislodge possible dust but that hasn’t improved the situation.

I haven’t taken the whole computer apart, but I have started hoping I could see something wrong.



The red circle is where the HDD connects to the board.

I was hoping to upload some high resolutions shots of these just incase someone picked up something I didn’t. I’ll try to upload them later when my brother isn’t playing CS:S.
Basically I’m looking for ideas. No hitting it with a hammer jokes please