U703 / U709 Rebuild

Ok if you decide to let me know. Did you find the color matched logitech or are you still using that?

Will do I'm going to clean out the garage in about two weeks and work on a project with my son. till then I will take a look at it if it's worth keeping. Keep you posted.

Hmm garage project you say, is it a car?

Here we go again. I though it was sold.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=320791162146&viewitem=&sspagename=ADME%3AB%3ASS%3AMOTORS%3A1123

At this point its probably more cost effective to just get myself a replacement uj-811 and transfer the face plate. I am not surprised the guy canceled the sale considering he paid a shit load and when he resold it he took a huge loss ($60 was it?)

Either way the buyer should have returned it to the original seller as he stated all parts worked and the unit clearly has a bad video.

I will back at this soon. Going to try to do some digging inside and see If I can get either board to recognize a harddrive or dvd drive. They did when I first got them now they aren't showing up in bios. Failing that I think I am going to try a external usb drive to see if it will see that. If so I am going to see about an internal usb mod and install a usb compact flash for a harddrive.

East I think you said the problem with these was the power wasn't getting to the board when the dvd and harddrives doesn't show up in bios. Has anyone tried a jumper wire to get power to the board to get it to work?

Not that I am aware of. I cant say for sure without looking on the k but on the t the hard drives do not actually show up in the bios There is raid interrupt screen (not present on the k) that allows you to define your array when the motherboard is working correctly.

As far as the optical drives. I know some people have bought the interface daughter board from me in the past when I have been selling fried motherboards to try and fix that problem on there own laptop. I am not sure if they had any success though. I have never had the problem myself nor seen anybody discussing how to fix it. Personally I tear it down and make sure everything is seated properly. Ok that's not entirely true I had the problem in my K but it was the optical drive. I opened it up and isolated the board from the drive case with a piece of packing tape and it has worked perfectly ever since.

Got the voodoo and the sager on the bed in pieces, may have something by tonight. I am thinking of swapping the bios chip out of the Voodoo into the Sager's board if that will work. It looks like they swap out. Let me finish splitting the case on the sager to get the board out.

Looking good so far. Keep in mind if the sager is not posting its more likely to be the way the video card, ram or cpu is seated rather then a faulty or misflashed bios. As far as I know though all revisions of the bios will run on all revision boards as long as your swapping T to T or K to K. Just make note of the chips orientation so that you do not install it backwards.

I would double check to see if the video card standoffs were ever resoldered. On the K I picked up a while back somebody resoldered them but they were too high to allow the video card to seat properly. One fell off and i ripped the other 2 off and drilled the board out and installed screw style desktop standoffs and nuts and it has ran great since. I never did get around to trimming them down so the palm rest fits though. Maybe this weekend I will finish it up.

I have found the bed is a bad place to work, Too many sheets and stuff for screws to get lost in. I prefer the floor

The sager looks very unmolested. All thermal pads are there, all screws in place except for the access doors on the bottom. It even had the pcmcia plastic block off and the tv video out rubber cover in place. Did voodoo do anything special on the splash screen for this model voodoo or was it a generic splash screen? I think I will keep the sager bios for right now. What was the second mini pci card slot for? Also I noticed the sager has a updated heat sink for the CPU area and it extends to the area where that video chip burns out on those older boards.

Case is back together. The bios on the board I was installing is soldered to the board. Can't swap it out too easy so it will just stay. The CPU is a 3.6 so I think I will just hold on to it for now. Now it time for new artic silver and check the pads on every thing else.


EDIT: There was a silver plate under the keyboard that the Voodoo didn't have. I swapped the one from the Sager in.

Well, A partial victory. It's alive, but still won't see the dvd drive. I noticed when putting it back together that the plug in for the harddrive was directly on the motherboard so I am not sure about that daughter board you are talking about unless it's the one on the end with the 90DEG down that the dvd drive plugs into. If so I will have to go back in and put the one that was in the voodoo in it. Also the voodoo had sata plug in with a 5.2 motherboard revision for the harddrives. The sager was 6.1 revision with a IDE plug for the harddrive. Will either work for this model or just the IDE? I know by swapping parts a lot of stuff was missing on the voodoo, like the metal plate that goes between the video card assy and the motherboard where it plugs in at. Had to swap a few pads out but it all looks good now. I can get the unit to boot off of usb flash drive and ran pendrivelinux on it for a few minutes. I may see if it can boot from compact flash and throw one it it for right now until I can get the harddrive and dvd drive issue sorted out.









The wireless card in the sager was different too. I used it instead of the intel 2200. It has a hook up on the upper left hand corner that says BT not sure if this is a combo card and that is for Bluetooth or not.

That is indeed the msi bluetooth combo card that came with these units. I still prefer a gigabyte HT01 for the sake of range (I even stuck one in the i222 I rebuilt not to long ago) The 2nd mpci slot is for the tv tuner card, Which is somewhat hard to find these days. You could also stick a 2nd mini pci wireless card in there and be on 2 networks at the same time or bridge them. The only thing is the key combo to turn the wireless radio off does not control mpci cards in the tv tuner slot. It does not matter if you use an ide or sata cable they will both work just fine if the cables are good (they are fragile and break very easily) The silver plate you speak of is required for proper airflow so its good that you replaced it. And yes that is the redesigned heatsink. That is the only one I use on my d900t's Compared to the old style one they are somewhat hard to find. The optical drive daughter board is the 90 degree one that the optical drives slide into.

Also I have found when assembling these the motherboard does not like to stay in place until you get the palmrest on and I have ended up reassembling the entire unit to find that the motherboard moved and the optical drives cant slide in so Usually after I get the motherboard in I slide at least 1 of the dvd drives in to keep it from moving around until I finish reassemble the unit.

If you have an extra set of base plastics you can make a custom cooling pad

If you have a spare video card you can buy this: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Clevo-M57u-Sager-5760-17in-Notebook-Laptop-P-R-/180807219263

Its core 2 duo and should just need a new video card, The one from the d900t/k interchanges with that model.

Sounds like a good deal but I can't touch it right now. Work has my 3rd and 4th pay check screwed up and I didn't get paid. So I am in broke land right now. Been trying to get it straight for about a week now.

I was thinking more into your optical drive issue. I have seen it on other laptops before and if the drives are seated properly its almost always a termination issue (Useually its the jumper pins on the ide drive bent/shorted togeather) That would not be applicable here since it is on a raid controller. I have heard that with laptop optical drives the master slave setting if flashed into the firmware. Although the d900 platform jumps them without modifying the firmware and they work no matter what slot you put them in so I don't know how accurate that information is.

It is either a connection issue, Faulty optical drive daughter board or a bad motherboard. The pcb in one of your optical drives could also be grounding against the optical drives case - I have seen that problem before many times over the years. A piece of packing tape should resolve the issue. Its hard to say for sure without having the unit in front of me.

I am ruling out the drive it's self right now since it had two dvd drives in the sager case, and it took both of them out and put the one from the voodoo in. If I get time tomorrow I will swap that daughter board out and see what I have on it.

Can I use either one of those harddrive connectors the IDE or SATA one?

The paradox camps after a principal love. An outline rules? His officer snacks! The group drags a past pulp. The rending thesis salts the pub. A lousy recipient spins its orientated postcard.

ADOR wrote:
Can I use either one of those harddrive connectors the IDE or SATA one?

Yeah

I am waiting to read your answer to the post immediately preceding your last one.

We're ignoring that one.