magnet trouble

ormondprop

i bought a sony FW 31E laptop after christmas and i was messing around on it today, i had a magnet in my hand and not even thinking i started rubbing it off the laptop which is now broken:( i'm wondering what sort of damage i cud have done, i reckon my hard drive is ruined as its making a funny noise, so i'm wondering will i have to change it and is this hard to do and/or what other damage could i have done

uberpixie

ormondprop wrote: »

i bought a sony FW 31E laptop after christmas and i was messing around on it today, i had a magnet in my hand and not even thinking i started rubbing it off the laptop which is now broken:( i'm wondering what sort of damage i cud have done, i reckon my hard drive is ruined as its making a funny noise, so i'm wondering will i have to change it and is this hard to do and/or what other damage could i have done

There is a good chance you have nuked your harddrive.

Bestbet: contact sony and send the unit in for repair, do not mention you were silly enough to run magnets up and down the laptop.....

Hopefully they will thing it is just a faulty harddrive and replace under your warranty and won't charge you for "customer induced damage"....

ormondprop

thanks uberpixie, i'll give that a try so

uberpixie

ormondprop wrote: »

thanks uberpixie, i'll give that a try so

Worst comes to worst: they twig and try to charge for the repair.

If they are asking stupid money: consider buying a new harddrive and fitting it yourself. A 500 gig laptop harddrive costs under 100 euro.

Bear in mind fitting the harddrive yourself totally voids the warranty and you will have to reinstall windows yourself and all the drivers so you would need to make sure you have the os disks that came with the laptop....

ormondprop

i didn't get any disks with the laptop but i backed it up and a few disks when i got it first, would the backup disks have windows and all the other drivers i'd need on them or do they only copy files and stuff like that

Gadgetman496

ormondprop wrote: »

i didn't get any disks with the laptop but i backed it up and a few disks when i got it first, would the backup disks have windows and all the other drivers i'd need on them or do they only copy files and stuff like that

If it was a procedure you were prompted to carry out at the first startup (and I suspect it was) then it should be a complete backup of everything including the OS. The only concern would be that it is tied to the HDD serial number in some way?

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uberpixie

gadgetman496 wrote: »

If it was a procedure you were prompted to carry out at the first startup (and I suspect it was) then it should be a complete backup of everything including the OS. The only concern would be that it is tied to the HDD serial number in some way?

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OEMs tie the OS to information stored in the bios on the motherboard.
(first Vista hacks that came out emulated information that would be stored in the bios for major OEMs in order to trick Vista into installing on a regular PC)

If they tied it to the harddrive it would be too much of a PITA to do bulk installs of the OS on new machines or replace harddrives.

Gadgetman496

uberpixie wrote: »

OEMs tie the OS to information stored in the bios on the motherboard.
(first Vista hacks that came out emulated information that would be stored in the bios for major OEMs in order to trick Vista into installing on a regular PC)

If they tied it to the harddrive it would be too much of a PITA to do bulk installs of the OS on new machines or replace harddrives.

Yep, I knew it was tied into something but I couldn't think at time of post
But you are correct, it is tied to the Mobo Bios. Depending on the manufacturer though, there are some that get upset with what they determine as major hardware changes other than the Mobo aren't there?

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