Goose the Blog 2.0

Story time, so get comfortable.

Those of you following the insubstantial minutiae of my life may recall that a little over a month ago I broke Wendy's laptop during a game of ball with the dogs.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, I found out that it would cost $1173.25 to fix the darn thing and decided that we were just going to buy a new laptop instead, and that it would probably be a super-cool Apple iBook or PowerBook. We even looked at some models at the Apple store, and were only waiting for the new Apple store to open at one of the malls in Delaware (late Sept or early Oct, they said) so we could buy one sales tax free. I know, we could have bought one at Best Buy or Circuit City or CompUSA, but for some reason we wanted to get it at an Apple store. It might have been the cool, minimalist decor.

Anyway, because it cost too much to fix the old laptop, I told them to just send it back to me without repairing it. I wanted to make sure the hard drive was wiped clean of our data, and I thought I might use it as a backup drive in my desktop if I could figure out how to mount it securely. I was willing to pay return shipping for that.

Two days later FedEx tried to deliver it, and because my signature-waiver-on-file wasn't good enough for this package, I had to rush over to the FedEx shipping center near my house to get it the night before we left for our trip to Los Angeles. Short for time, I just popped open the box to make sure everything was inside and that they hadn't tried to charge me a lot of money for not fixing it. I had expected to pay their shipping cost and labor (someone had to work on it to figure out why it was broken) so I was surprised to find that there were no charges at all. I still half-expect to get a bill from them, so we will see how that turns out.

One week later, a day after returning from LA, I finally took the old laptop out of the shipping box, got out my littlest Phillips screwdriver, and prepared to take out the hard drive. On a lark, I thought I'd press the power button, as I had done fruitlessly so many times before.

Holy crap - it turned on! LEDs flashed, fans came on, and things spun up. The BIOS showed the Vaio logo on the screen and sang it's short song. Then it stopped - "Operating system not found." Well, that wasn't great, but holy crap, it was on. I ran upstairs to show Wendy.

I don't remember our conversation. I remember that we were both disappointed that if it worked, we might not be getting a cool iBook after all. But first I had to see if I could get it to boot up.

I grabbed the system repair DVDs that Wendy had intelligently made a few days after we originally purchased the computer, and went downstairs to work on it again. Sony had warned us that the technicians would probably erase any data on the drive during their repair attempts, but I expected that they would have re-installed the factory image after that. I figured that maybe my repair refusal had aborted all action on my computer except putting it in a box and shipping it back, and that explained the blank drive. I put the repair DVDs in the drive and went through the repair process. First time, I used an option that was supposed to reset only the C partition to the factory image. That didn't boot. Next, I used the option that restored the factory image on both the C and D partitions, but that didn't boot either. Finally, I decided to repartition the whole thing and install the factory image. That also didn't boot.

Maybe we would get an iBook after all. I thought that the drive wasn't being recognized because some part of the motherboard got fried by the coffee spill (I knew the drive had been okay because I was able to get the data off it and onto my desktop before sending it out for repair). I went to the BIOS setup and sure enough, the only IDE device was the secondary DVD drive - the primary hard drive wasn't showing up.

So, I got my littlest screwdriver again and opened up the hard drive cover on the bottom of the laptop. It looked like all the pins were okay, so I unscrewed the mounting bolts and took the drive out. I knew then that the motherboard was probably okay and that I had unnecessarily erased all the old data on the drive in my attempt to reset (and repartition) it to get the computer to boot. Can you guess the problem? I know I haven't spelled it all out here explicitly, but the solution is there.

Give up? I left the jumper in the slave position on the hard drive when I put it back in the laptop after rescuing its data to my desktop. Because the desktop already had a master drive, the laptop hard drive had to be the slave, and I had to put that little jumper on it. Because of the jumper, the laptop BIOS couldn't find the primary IDE device it was expecting. This may also explain why the repair techs thought nearly everything was wrong with my laptop when they tried to fix it. Nothing they did worked! They couldn't even reset a factory image on the drive, so the DVD must also be broken, too!

Anyway, to make a long story less long, after removing the jumper, everything booted up nicely, and I copied all our old data and a few apps back to the nice, clean Sony, single partition install. By Friday evening, everything important was back in place and the computer was fully functional.

The bad news is no cool iBook for us (yet). The good news is we saved a couple thousand dollars.

Yet, a mystery remains: why did the laptop not power up when I sent it away, yet it powered up with no problem when it came back, reportedly without any repairs being made? I feel bad because I think the repair technician might have accidentally left a new power supply (or even more, like the motherboard and DVD drive they wanted to replace as well) in the computer before shipping it back. I think I can live with my guilt though. Perhaps it is a big dose of instant-karma for all the times I gave back the extra change a cashier had over-returned.