Asus notebook wont boot up.

[ss]

Will do.

[ss]

I only use it on holiday so maybe twice a year....AND it still has win XP! Mainly used for spreadsheets and photoshop on hols.

[ss]

Label on back: Asus Eee PC 1001P

[%%]

Fark, that?s mad with the chargers.

Looks like you are breaking the chargers by yanking the plug out of the laptop by yanking on the cable and have likely broken the connector attachment to the pcb now.

[Adrian Caspersz]

Click on the link for "ASUS Eee PC 1001PX Charging Socket Replacement"

[Paul]

This might not even be close, but the schematic will show their thoughts on design. The EC on this one isn't tied into the power as directly as the other sample schematic.

It's a pretty low power laptop, and hard to understand how the power connector might get burned on those.

You could look for a replacement motherboard on Ebay, or a fully working unit, and do transplants as you see fit. Only Windows XP activation will be an issue. Windows will be insufferable, every inch of the way (need to install IE8 to attempt to activate and so on if doing a clean install).

Paul

[ss]

Thats all a bit too tecnical for me. However thinking about previous posts I suspect it is not the `mains charger` connection, as it is a new battery I would expect some charge in it, as the asus remains totally dead I suspect something internal. (maybe the on/off switch) I will open it up but unless I see a broken connection or something else obvious I will just bin it.

[Chris Hogg]

If you bin it, don't forget to extract the HDD and smash it up to destroy the disc. I usually open my old HDDs and extract both the magnets and the disc itself. The magnets are very strong, and come in useful occasionally, while the disc makes a nice shiny coaster.

[ss]

Thanks for the info Paul. I am ok with mechanical repairs and `big`part` soldering but I suspect this machine will be beyond my capabilities. I only use it a couple of times a year so if I dont find anything maybe time to get a cheap replacement, its already 9 years old, and I use my desktop for daily use.

[ss]

Yes will do. Old hard drives from previous desk tops I use as an external back up but this one will be destroyed.

[Paul]

Just make sure you've tried enough combinations of old-battery/new-battery and working adapter, to make sure it really is dead.

*******

There could be one of these inside, and your meter should read "3.0V" if working OK. The dual diode next to this, ensures that even if there was physically a way to plug it in backwards, nothing would be blown. It is polarity protected, as part of charge-prevention being implemented.

Those are still working, when as low as 2.3V. This allows

0.3V for drop across the BAT54 diode, and leave 2.0V as the minimum the RTC will accept. Below about 2.3V, it may have trouble keeping the time, when all power (including main battery) has been removed.

When the battery is fresh and new, it reads 3.1V or so. It might read 3.0V for three years. During the last three weeks of its life, it can drop from 3.0 to 2.3 during that interval.

By leaving the main battery pack in place, there may be some way for the motherboard to power the RTC from the main battery, rather than from the small coin cell. That way, it can last ten years or more.

Paul

[The Natural Philosopher]

why?

I usually open my old HDDs and extract both the

[Chris Hogg]

By implication, you're suggesting it's not necessary. I do it because I don't want anyone who might recover the computer from the recycle process, remove the hard disc intact and get personal data, passwords, bank data, whatever, from it.

[The Natural Philosopher]

actually these things are modular: repairing them is a question of buying a part on ebay and plugging it in

[The Natural Philosopher]

Why not take th HDD and put it in a USB caddy?

Or just write zeros all over it.

I mean really, do you think people take scrapped computers and spend hours reading disk drives?

I am amazed at the number of people who seem to think their personal data is worth te attention of the NSA

I assume that as some point my mobile phone will be stolen. That is why there are only a couple of email passwords on it, that I can change in 2 minute.

[Andy Burns]

At what point does it become good money after bad? For a 10+ year old netbook, I'd cut and run, try to sell the new battery and charger.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Well yes. Depends on the opportunity cost of buying something equivalent. Asus are not bad machines generally. Might have to spend £300-400 for something as good, or £10 for a new PUS adapter board

[Paul]

You can cable up the drive to a desktop PC and use DBAN.

's_Boot_and_Nuke

You have to be careful though, to un-cable the regular hard drive and any backup external drives, before running a program like that. Just the target hard drive should be connected to the working PC, then use DBAN. There were some pretty comical situations, where people would write into the DBAN forum and ask "how can I recover my external backup drive that just got erased". Of course, recovery at that point is impossible.

The modern version of DBAN gets stuck on an advert at the end, once the erasure is complete. Just push the PC reset button. As an erased drive doesn't care about a power-off or reset or anything at that point

*******

You can also use Secure Erase or Enhanced Secure Erase but these require a bit of background research. The capability is password protected. You can write the password on the drive with a marker pen, as the only purpose of the password is to prevent malware from using it.

Inside the "HDDEraseWeb.zip" file download, is

HDDErase.iso 1,867,776 bytes (DOS based booter)

Probably some time next year, PCs are going to show up where that disc won't boot.

The feature is available on any reasonably recent IDE or SATA. Not available on SCSI (not added to SCSI standard).

*******

If the drive has an HPA, you remove the HPA first before doing erasure. Host Protected Area allows the effective size of the drive to be modified. And many other utilities can be defeated by such features (so erasure doesn't erase the whole thing). Usually when a tool has an HPA exposure, the instructions will mention it. In Linux, something like "hdparm" might have commands for that. Note that only one HPA command per boot session is allowed, and thus the work is punctuated by endless reboots. If using Linux Live, you use a USB3 stick with your boot OS on it :-) Because of the level of aggravation involved.

My PC has an Intel SB (six SATA ports). None of those allow HPA commands. It's blocked in the BIOS module. However, a second chip, a JMicron IDE chip, they "forgot" to block HPA, and that chip works fine for clearing HPA setups. I use an IDE to SATA converter, to clear HPA off SATA drives. Once the HPA is removed, now it's off to DBAN or whatever.

If an HPA is present, doing an electronic check of the size of the drive, will not match the byte size written on the label. Using hdparm to work on it, comes after that.

Lots of stuff doesn't use HPA, but the erasure process still requires consideration of it. One OEM computer "multiplexes" five partitions into a four partition setup, using HPA as the mechanism.

*******

Physically damaging disks, is potentially dangerous. Especially if you're a klutz with power tools.

Drilling a single hole through the chassis and platter area, is sufficient to disable the drive (the heads will be destroyed when they rub over that feature).

Also, with the cover removed, bending each platter just a little bit with vice grips is enough to disable it. MFM is hard to do on bent metal surfaces...

You don't have to mash it into a metallic pulp.

Platter materials are subject to change. Aluminium platters are being replaced with glass, for some of the larger capacity drives. That's just in case you were bashing away with your sledge, and a piece of glass came flying back at you.

Paul

[Paul]

This depends a lot on the used market.

The used market is not rational, and people can be quite surprised at what they can get. There are cases where a local computer store "wants $300 for mobo" for a repair, and Ebay has an entire computer with the same motherboard inside for $100 or less.

The thing is, if you're doing a repair for someone else, they might insist on WinXP, new hardware won't run WinXP, so you cobble together some old kit and send them on their way. It has more to do with customer taste and sensibilities, than with price.

You wouldn't do such a thing for your own usage. Especially with something with an N270 (Atom) in it. Sure, the battery lasts a long time... did I mention the battery lasts a long time ? There was one dual-core Atom available at the time, and Intel restricted its usage because to release the dual-core to everyone, would have "eaten a hole in the laptop market". That's why most of those style of single-core machines, suck. Thanks to Intel.

Paul

[Chris Green]

Well don't store them there then! :-) ... or at least keep them in some properly encrypted form.

However the chances of anyone going to the trouble of trying to extract useful (as in getting monetary advantage) information from your old laptop is small enough not to be worth bothering about IMHO.