A customer brings in a dead Dell Inspiron N5110.
Problem was his invoices were on the laptop and he needed to change one. Normally this would be a simple job. Undo a couple of screws on the bottom and the hard drive would either slide or pull out.
Not the case on a Dell N5110, the hard drive is attached directly to the motherboard and worse still you have to take the laptop to bits completely to get at it.
- Remove the battery and power supply.
- Undo all screws on the bottom.
- Remove the panel covering the memory modules.
- Pull the DVD-RW drive out from the side.
- Using a sharp knife and a screw driver gently remove the keyboard. There are four little clips at the top of the keyboard.
- Detach the keyboard ribbon cable from the motherboard along with all the other visible cables.
- Separate the two halves of the base. It can be quite tight. I start above the DVD-RW slow and pull apart.
- You will now see the top of the motherboard. The hard drive is underneath!
- You could replace the CMOS battery at this point. They last a few years and the first you know they are dead is when the date and time are wrong by years.
- Unclip the black and white wire from the wireless card. These two cables come out of the right hand side screen hinge.
- Undo all screws that have a solid white arrow pointing to them on the motherboard.
- Undo the two screws on each hinge that attaches the screen to the base. Gently remove the screen and the plastic cover from the base that goes from one side to the other.
- Remove the Dell blanking card from the SD Card slot.
- The motherboard should now come out.
Undo the two screws circled and gently slide the hard drive to the left.
The hard drive is now out.