Upgrading & Fixing Laptops DUMmIES

3. Remove the hard drive from its bay.
   Consult the instructions for your laptop for specific instructions on
   unlatching the drive.


4. Look for bent pins or other obvious signs of damage to the connector
   on the hard drive, or on its matching port on the laptop.
   Some minor damage can be repaired by carefully moving pins back to
   their original position. Be sure you do not move pins back and forth
   repeatedly; this causes metal fatigue that could result in a break.


5. Reinstall the hard drive in its bay, carefully following instructions in
   the laptop’s manual.


6. Reinstall the battery and the power adapter and hope for the best.

Hard luck stories ..................................................................................

And if you’re not lucky, and the hard drive never comes around, you’ve got a
few other options:

If your laptop is still under warranty, send it back to the manufacturer

or bring it into a service depot to have a new drive installed.The com-

puter maker should do you the courtesy of partitioning and formatting

the drive and installing the operating system. (You do have backups of

all of your important data, right? You need them to reinstall on the new

drive. You also need to locate and use the original installation disks for

applications.)

If your laptop is no longer under warranty, install your own replace-

ment hard drive.(I discuss hard drive replacement details in Chapter 7.)

Once again, I’m hoping that you have all of your data on a backup hard

drive or a set of CD-Rs or other media.

If you’re so unlucky as to have a dead disk drive but not a full set of

essential data backups, consider a disaster recovery service.They

don’t work cheap — figure on a minimum charge somewhere in the

range of $100–$250 and going up from there depending on the size of

drive and the nature of the problem — but in most situations they can

open a dead drive in a clean room and get it running long enough to

transfer its contents to a new drive. The only miracle they cannot per-

form is the resurrection of data from a section of the disk that has

severe physical damage. For example, if the read/write head crashes

into the magnetized platter and gouges a hole, that section of the drive

may be unreadable. (But then again, that portion of the drive just might

hold something you don’t need restored, such as the operating system,

software, or a temporary Windows or Internet file.)

Chapter 3: Things That Go Bump In the Night (or Day) 39