No known history, had been dumped minus HD. Display , battery, ps, DVD , keyboard , floppy is fine but does not recognize there is a new/different HD. F2 setup BIOS page is "greyed out" on the HD section. Would obtaining a Dell dignostics disk tell me anything I don't know. Setup does recognize the DVD ident. 5V and grounds on the HD IDE connector are fine, and HD spins up properly. Should say I've borrowed a small capacity HD , with DOS 5 on it, for checking out before getting a more appropriate HD. I can load and operate DOS6 from floppy but no more than that.
Obviously something had fallen mid centre of the keyboard, space bar keytop is missing but the switch functions. The empty MPEG case under is dented and a piece of structural plastic below it is cracked , so perhaps some shockwave collateral damage somewhere
Maybe look for cracked traces around the HD connector.
BTW, replacing a bad keyboard is usually a cheap & simple operation.
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. | ,. w , "Some people are alive only because
\\|/ \\|/ it is illegal to kill them." Perna condita delenda est
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Perhaps is more productive than doing crosswords or soduki and I may learn something in the process. Scoping the pins from powerup to F2/setup BIOS page appearance, shows no activity on DATA0 to DATA15 , activity on ADDR0 to 2 , and some other pins , many other go H but 2 IDE lines stay L, IOCS16 and PDIAG. These 2 lines show nothing on "diode" test relative to mobo 0 or 5V rails. 30M resistance check from IDE pin 32 or 34 , (IOCS16 and PDIAG ) to a block of conductive foam connected to the other DVM lead show no resistance below 30M dabbing over the Mobo on both sides.
I have the datasheet for the large Intel FW82371 chip 20 x 20 point array. The IDE DATA0-15 lines trace back directly to this Intel. Unfortunately the reverse side of the pcb to this chip is not an exact 20x 20 array and cannot be sure whether any pad comes out from array pin (line V,col 12) which should be IOC16. All pads around that area show a diode response. The line could go via a buffer of course .
Next timewasting will be conductive pad tracing out from the pads near V12 across the board and then connect 1K between IDE32 and any circa V12 pad I cannot find a conductive connection to.
The rear knock point was on the edge of this FW chip , not directly in kline between IDE and FW but the trace could loop around that area in the multilayer structure.
BTW I did try 2 off 8mm x 3mm , 460KHz piezo element , transmitter and receiver , one mechanically connected to a pin and trace on a scrap board, but could not even divine an exposed trace with the other. May try amplifying the transmit and receive sides , rather than just SG and scope, when I have a bit of time, as does not look very promising as a divining technique for tracing broken , buried , traces.
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