The game of variables
Can’t have too many tools in the chest. True for woodworking. True for keeping a whole bunch of laptops alive in the educational setting.
As a school board, we don’t have enough computers to go around, and when one stops working, it does get noticed. A lot of them seem to find their way to my cubicle; trips by trucking firms, drops from travelling personnel, other undocumented arrivals (I get to work each morning with wonder – wonder what might have been left on my desktop). If there is a service note, it tends to be cryptic. That’s life.
Let’s take a case for purposes of example. A box, left beside my chair. Inside, a lot of old cardboard residue, in lieu of proper packing materials. A quick note, saying that the laptop won’t boot and that the data on the drive is important. That’s it; not even a wish for good luck in the struggles.
Not an old machine, and no obvious signs of abuse. The BIOS screen comes up, and then nothing more. Check to see that everything is “in its place and tight”; drive, memory, battery. Try booting with a CD. Nada. Pull the drive and reseat it. Nothing. Pull the drive and try booting with a copy of Linux.
Now we’re getting somewhere. Live CD works. Replace the drive. Same old nada. Hmm. Pop out the drive, invoke the BIOS setup. Everything seems ordinary, but just for fun I’ll switch the SATA from AHCI to compatible. Save and reboot.
We’ve got a live one here. Someone else had misjudged the drive setting, and I found the error. Do the upgrade route, pack the machine back into its cardboard debris and send to shipping. One more thing off the list of mysteries in my life.
