Hector Martin

good news: I found that this flex can be fixed... well ok, the only thing that can fix it is an incinerator, but i "fixed" by cutting off the end of it, peeling the adhesive mask, and replacing the backing good news #2: almost all keyboard columns work bad news: spacebar doesn't

i'm not sure what is worse, that i feel compelled to fix this stuff, or that i keep finding absolutely horrible ad-hoc ways to make it work for a few hours longer than it's supposed to

it looks like -most- of the keys were broken because the flex cable connected to keyboard columns oxidized to hell. I managed to make that work. however, -spacebar specifically- only works in some positions on the flex cable, i.e. the design failure of the keyboard assy broke it

THE FLOPPY DRIVE I HAVE IN THE LAPTOP CANNOT READ 1.44M FLOPPY DISKS IT'S TOO OLD

the BIOS only starts up if I configure the floppy as a 1.2M drive (what the hell is an 1.2M floppy drive?!), and if I try to read my 1.44M floppy, DOS makes an utterly reprehensible sound and asks me "Abort, Retry, Fail?" where all three options do the same thing brilliant

well surely I can format my existing floppies as 1.2M... "Invalid media or Track 0 bad - disk unusable" oh for fuck's sake

to reiterate, I've tried every option the BIOS has and it refuses to do anything with the floppy drive unless it's set to 1.2M -- that means 360K, 720K, 1.44M don't work. sadly it looks like DOS doesn't understand 1.2M 3.5" floppies, which is probably why floppy was turned off

if I format a HD floppy as 1.2M, select the 1.2M option in BIOS and then try to read it in the laptop, it makes a different, slightly less reprehensible sound and complains of "General failure reading drive A"...