For what IT worths

For the past two and a half year, I’m using a Panasonic Toughbook CF-W2 notebook. It haven’t lost any of its shine during this time. The magnesium-alloy case and the passive cooling, along with the low power consumption and the small weight are the key factors of its success. It is my companion all day, every day.

It still has one weakness, though. Its hard disk drive. Even though it is encased in a shock-proof foam or something that sort, it still is a very delicate piece of electronics, with lots of moving parts inside. About half year ago, the one in my Toughbook decided to behave more and more weird, with occasional halts (appearing as IO Errors, constant on HDD led, and a spindown sound), so I thought it’s time to replace it.

That’s where the challenge started. Taking apart a Toughbook is a tough task. With only a limited set of small screwdrivers, I even needed some help from a nearby clock repair shop to unscrew one of the bottom-screws without damaging its head.

It seems like the HDD is treated like the very heart of the system, so in order to get there, you need to unscrew every single screw in both sides and inside the machine. The HDD replacement therefore took 2 hours. Plus backing up from the old drive, which - luckily enough - still had enough life in it to copy almost all data to the new drive.

And then came the shock. While the notebook worked while plugged in, it just did not want to boot up from battery, it died too soon in the bootup process. I thought I’ve screwed up something there, but it became even more weird. I’ve removed the battery, booted up by plugging in, only to realise that the built-in WiFi is no longer working. Turned off, turned on again. Bummer. The machine’s power led doesn’t even blink. Unplugged the cord, plugged again. Now boots. But alas, still no luck with WiFi.

The linux ipw2100 driver at least tells after a long timeout that it recognised the device, but could not power it up. Why would that happen? Is it the new HDD? Does that eat too much juice? Maybe, maybe not. I’ve checked the HDD specification sheets, which tells it’s a general, low power consumption notebook drive. Ok, we might go for a solid-state disk instead. Nope, the price is still prohibitive. More googling…

A couple of forum postings tell that, since the Toughbook uses ultra low voltages, it can only handle a 3.3V drive, which you can’t buy in retail shops. Dammit. There’s an alternative method, though, to mod a “normal” notebook HDD to work with Toughbooks. It says you need to remove pins 41 and 44.

Yuck, damaging some delicate electronic equipment just doesn’t fit into my picture of repair. Nor does taking the laptop apart again seems a good idea to me. Nevertheless, I went on very-very cautiously, only bending the two pins, and connecting the drive again. Luckily, the HDD connector was working ok, even though it wasn’t totally in place due to the bent pins. And miraculously, all the symptoms disappeared, the notebook booted off using batteries only, WiFi worked again.

So I took a deep breath, and took the machine apart the third time now (by this time I have some routine in this process, so it went very smooth), to irreversibly remove those two nasty pins from the HDD. I felt uneasy doing that stuff, and I still don’t feel well when I think of it, but the fact that with this I got back my Toughbook fully functioning helps enduring this barbarian act.

Finally, everything’s back to normal, and my Toughbook is stronger than ever with twice its original HDD size, a mere 80GB! Ok, the battery time reduced somewhat, but that’s also the effect of the “normal” aging process of Lithium-ion batteries, and it still gives me enough juice for more than 2 hours.

DISCLAIMER: I wrote this article to tell the story of repairing my Tougbook, and I discourage anyone doing as I did, as there’s no guarantee that this will work for you too, and there’s plenty of things that can break/go wrong during the process, resulting in a pile of useless parts once called a notebook. So don’t blame me if you screwed up this way, it is your machine and your life, therefore it is ABSOLUTELY YOUR RESPONSIBILITY.