{"id":1293,"date":"2012-11-28T22:37:36","date_gmt":"2012-11-29T02:37:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/?p=1293"},"modified":"2023-11-24T13:58:33","modified_gmt":"2023-11-24T17:58:33","slug":"how-to-dell-inspiron-1525-repair","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/2012\/how-to-dell-inspiron-1525-repair\/","title":{"rendered":"How to: Dell Inspiron 1525 repair"},"content":{"rendered":"

As the “computer guy<\/a>” in the family from time to time a repair job will land on my doorstep. This was an older Dell Inspiron 1525<\/a> laptop that wasn’t booting anymore. This time it wasn’t some horrible virus that had eaten a system file, but the hard drive starting to fail (something I verified by booting a Live USB version of Ubuntu<\/a>).<\/p>\n

The very first thing you need to do at any sign of hard drive failure is run a complete backup. If you really care about some of the data, then I suggest you start with the bits you really care about (photos) and work your way outwards to a full backup. Don’t be shy about “wasting” backup drive space, this might be the last hour (or minutes) of functioning drive. I make this comment from experience watching a full backup stop due to total drive failure\u00a0part way through the photo directories after successfully backing up a bunch of system files.<\/p>\n

You can (as I have) try gddrescue<\/a> or similar recover tools once you’ve done what you can with the drive in terms of backup. This might get you a little bit more data, but these tools are in my opinion last ditch efforts to salvage failing media. You can try the freezer trick<\/a>, or even warming the drive up<\/a> but don’t count on them working. It’s worth repeating: nothing beats regular backups<\/strong> – unless it’s automatic nightly incremental backups with off-site replication.<\/p>\n

Replacing the failed drive is simply a matter of finding the manual<\/a>, and buying a matching drive<\/a>. If this were my personal system I’d be tempted to upgrade to a SSD<\/a>, but there is still a big price difference. I booted from the Live USB Ubuntu for the first boot after install, this let me check the hardware was good to go and to peek at the SMART<\/a> data. It was interesting to see that the\u00a0SMART data says power cycles=4, I guess they really do test the drives at the factory.<\/p>\n

Installing using the Dell Windows install disks went smoothly, the driver installation steps were annoying and kludgey feeling but not too horrible. Time then crawled to a stand still as I worked my way through the updates from Microsoft, one patch set at a time from 2008 (era of the install media) to present day. Many, many, many reboots later I had a clean install that was fully patched and ready to go back. If you find yourself having to do this more than once in a long while, consider using a more advanced technique<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Well, with the exception of the problem of a missing key. Amazingly the lack of the key didn’t prevent you from using it – the ‘T’ worked just fine, it just felt very wrong. I quick trip off to ebay and I was able to locate a suitable replacement<\/a>. It turns out I needed a K26 type key, and that the same model had at least four variations. This website had a handy guide<\/a> for selecting the type of key you needed.<\/p>\n

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Pictured above is what arrived in the mail. A rubber plunger, a plastic hinge and the key cap. First I needed to pop the hinge off of the key, the blade from my swiss army knife did the job worked well. Then I had to puzzle a bit over which way the hinge was supposed to go on the keyboard.<\/p>\n

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I hope the picture above helps others understand how it is supposed to fit on the keyboard – it was the image I had hoped to find on the internet when I was trying to figure it out. Some of the \u00a0youtube videos show using needle nose pliers to do the installation, I found that my fingernails did the job. One the hinge in on, simply plop the rubber plunger in the middle – large base down as pictured in the arrive in the mail shot. The key cap will just snap on when placed on top and pressed down – work the top first, then the bottom.<\/p>\n

Replacing the missing key was very satisfying, \u00a0not very expensive and the improvement was both cosmetic and functional.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As the “computer guy” in the family from time to time a repair job will land on my doorstep. This was an older Dell Inspiron 1525 laptop that wasn’t booting anymore. This time it wasn’t some horrible virus that had eaten a system file, but the hard drive starting to fail (something I verified by … Continue reading “How to: Dell Inspiron 1525 repair”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1293","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-diy","category-how-to"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1293","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1293"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1293\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2227,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1293\/revisions\/2227"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}