Introduction

Unresolved problems

• WinModem
• Memory stick (?)
• Jog dial
• i.Link firewire port

Flakiness

• Sometimes the OSS sound driver gives the error "/dev/dsp is busy", and there is nothing I can do, short of rebooting, to regain access to the sound card.

System information

Shrinking the windows partition

1. Turn on the Z505HE
2. The default configuration is 4GB Windows/ 4GB other. If you don't want to shrink the windows partition, then you can skip this step.
3. Create a FIPS floppy; this is a DOS bootable floppy that contains the files restorerb.exe, errors.txt, and fips.exe, which can be found in the dosutils directory of the RedHat 6.2 CD-ROM. Test that you can boot with this floppy.
4. Disable virtual memory

     Control Panel-->System-->Performance-->Virtual Memory
   

5. Disable the screen saver

     Control Panel-->Display-->Screen Saver
   

6. Run CheckDisk (1 minute) by right clicking on the c:\ icon.
7. Run ScanDisk (20 minutes)
8. Boot from the FIPS floppy.
9. Follow the instructions and give 2.5GB to Windows.
10. FIPS should work perfectly, though it exists with an error about loading COMMAND.COM. (Verify this by booting from the flopping again, and getting a directory listing on C:)
11. Now reboot windows and re-enable the screen saver and virtual memory; windows will restart.

Installing RedHat 6.2

Installing kernel 2.3.99-pre3

Floppy

• Experimental drivers
• USB
• /dev/usbfs file system option
• Experimental mass storage modules (usb-storage)
• SCSI support, because floppy is configured as sda

cd /lib/modules/2.3.99-pre3

echo "Inserting USB core."
/sbin/insmod usb/usbcore.o
echo "Inserting USB UHCI hub driver."
/sbin/insmod usb/usb-uhci.o

echo "Inserting SCSI modules."
/sbin/insmod scsi/scsi_mod.o
/sbin/insmod scsi/sd_mod.o

echo "Loading USB storage module (please wait!)"
/sbin/insmod usb/usb-storage.o

echo "Telling SCSI about the USB storage device"
echo 'scsi add-single-device 1 0 0 0' > /proc/scsi/scsi  

echo "Pausing..."
echo "Mounting floppy on /mnt/floppy."

mount -t vfat /dev/sda /mnt/floppy   

echo "Type umountfloppy to unmount the floppy, when done."

Sound

APM

PCMCIA

Modem

Infrared

  I have been trying to get IR working on a z505hs, and I finally
  did. Here's how: 1) the irport is seen as serial port: ttyS2 at
  0x3e8 as an 8250 and irq 4.  there are a few things wrong with this
  picture. First, irq 4 is probably not right. In my case the bios
  actually had irq 10. Second, I am told that the chip is 16550
  compatible, not 8250, so that is wrong too. But most importantly,
  you don't even want to use it as a serial port.

  step 1) setserial /dev/ttyS2 port 0x4e8. This is a hack, it is just
  to get the serial driver from locking up the io port. If
  you have a modular serial driver it is best just not to
  load it.

  step 2) edit /etc/conf.modules to include: 
  alias tty-ldisc-11 irtty 
  alias char-major-161 ircomm-tty 
  alias irda0 nsc-ircc 
  options nsc-ircc dongle_id=0x09 

  last, issue the command: 
  /usr/sbin/irattach irda0 -s1 

  Now you should have working irda. 

  This all assumes that you compiled the irda as modules and included
  the nsc-ircc driver, which is the proper driver for this
  laptop. WITHOUT THE NSC-IRCC DRIVER THE ABOVE WILL NOT WORK!!!

  To look at the ir-howto, and you should be able to figure it out
  from this point on. The serial driver, and irtty is a red-herring, I
  could never get that to work.

  With the nsc-ircc I could do a palm V sync by: 

  /sbin/mknod /dev/ircomm0 c 161 0 
  /sbin/insmod irda 
  /sbin/insmod ircomm 
  /usr/sbin/irattach irda0 -s1 
  /usr/bin/pilot-xfer -p /dev/ircomm0 -L 

  and after a few seconds it listed all my databases. I did not feel
  that it was very fast, but at least it works. I will not be
  experimenting with other things, sending files to windows users,
  etc. . . I have not done any trouble shooting, after a few hours I
  was just ecstatic that the laptop could see the palm and vice-versa

  I found the following links helpful: 
  http://www.pasta.cs.uit.no/pipermail/linux-irda/2000-February.txt 
  http://linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/IR-HOWTO.html 

  Let's keep the solutions coming! 
  Oscar Boykin

External video

   There is a problem when using the video port.  Upon pressing
   Fn + F7 the fourth time, the display gets scrambled.
   The fix is to press Fn + F, which toggles the 
   unsynchronized mess mode on and off.

Brightness

  To brighten display   Fn+F5
  To dim display        Shift+Fn+F5

Ethernet

However, according to an email from David Fox, the ethernet adapters in Z505Hs with an older BIOS have problems resuming:

   Bios 116 is the one that fixes a problem with the ethernet resuming
   after suspend.  I haven't found it, I think I have 110.

   William A. Stein writes:
   > David Fox wrote:
   > 
   > > By the way, do you know what BIOS do you have on your machines?
   > BIOS Version:   RO116Z1  /  RK116Z1
   > Serial Number: 28305630-3207642   (of one of the machines)

Fine tuning

Rearranging the keyboard

1. Create a file called keymap that contains the following lines:

      ! Make some substitutions...    
      !  (type xmodmap -pke for a list of keycodes)
      !
      ! For example, the following line makes 
      ! the windows key into the `~ key.
      keycode 115 = asciitilde grave  
      ! This makes the other windows key into 
      ! the delete key.
      keycode 117 = Delete
      ! Make the ~` key into an Escape key (the 
      ! previous escape is not disabled.)
      keycode 49  = Escape
      keycode 37  = Control_L
      keycode 66  = Caps_Lock
   

2. The command

      xmodmap keymap 
   

   then makes the above changes, at least until you restart X windoes.
3. By placing inserting the keymap file into your .Xmodmap file, they will automatically take effect when you start X windows.

Taking the Z505HE Completely Apart

Digital camera

RIO 500 via the USB port

onHandPC

Olympus DS-150 digital recorder

Fuji 4700 digital camera

Field Notes

Missing Key

From: William Stein 
To: "john" 
Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2002 12:29:40 -0500
On Monday 28 October 2002 10:40 am, you wrote:
> my name is john
>
> was just searching for spare parts for my sony z505-je notebook and came
> across your site
>
> i have a key missing from it ( the FN) key, second key from the left at the
> bottom
>
> just wondered if you knew where i could get one from?

I have no idea.  Many of the keys are interchangeable; maybe you could
use your menu key, which is just to the right of the alt key on the
right side of the space bar, as a Fn key.  This would make sense if
you use your Fn key a lot, but never use the menu key (e.g., I never use
my menu key).

 -- William

Hard drive remark

From: William Stein 
To: [email protected]
Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2002 13:58:24 -0400

On Friday 25 October 2002 12:00 pm, you wrote:
>    Apparently they can't find the disk you mentioned in stock
>    anywhere. Do you have a suggestion as to where to look? Or should I
>    just get another disk?
>
>   Thanks for your help,

Any 9.5mm 2.5inch laptop drive should work in the VAIO; it's very
standard.  

I recommend getting a Toshiba that is at least 40GB, since they're
quiet.  Fujitsu's suck.  It probably doesn't matter if the model is
exactly the same as the model for mine.  Also, if they say they can
get a certain model, try to find a review or opinion about it on the
web to see if it is decent.
 -- William

Hard drive death!

To: [email protected]
Date:  Mon, 21 Oct 2002 15:17:10 -0400

On Monday 21 October 2002 02:15 pm, you wrote:
>   Guess what, my Vaio's disk died last weekend... We tried to
>   repartition it with the syst adm here to no avail. Could you please
>   tell me what of new disk did you put in yours? I remember when you
>   were going to change it. Also do you have suggestions for changing
>   it? The sys adm will try to so it himself but he, of course, can't
>   guarantee what the result could be and any help could be useful!

It's easy to do if you are VERY CAREFUL.  It is necessary to take the
laptop completely apart, but fortunately I made complete illustrated
directions about how to do this:

           http://modular.math.washington.edu/z505he/apart/

WARNING: There are other illustrated directions on the internet for
taking the Z505 apart, but they are wrong.

I first put a Fujitsu 10GB drive in my computer, but it SUCKED,
because it was incredibly loud.  I took that one out, and put a huge
Toshiba MK4018 40GB 9.5mm 2.5inch drive in, which is wonderful.  You
should be able to buy such a disk for less than $200.

   -- William

Weird X crash

From: Kevin Buzzard

Kevin

Melted Screw

Date: Sun, 9 Jul 2000 12:54:13 +0100 (bst)
From: Kevin Buzzard 
X-Sender: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: My computer is broken

My computer is a little bit broken. Imagine there were 4 screws somehow holding the keyboard fixed, and imagine if the top right hand one came out. Then every time you pressed the backspace key, the entire top right hand area of the keyboard would go down about 1.5 mm until it hit something in the box, so backspace would make a much bigger "clunk" than all the rest of the keys and also whenever you hit it, you'd be smashing something important underneath the keyboard. Well, that's what seems to have happened to my computer. I dunno about the explanation, but certainly the symptoms are happening (the top RH part of the keyboard goes down 1.5 mm whenever I press it). What the hell do I do next? Take it apart, phone someone up, or take it to a computer shop or what? Is it under warrenty? Kevin

Date: Wed, 12 Jul 2000 16:57:36 +0100 (bst)
From: Kevin Buzzard 
X-Sender: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Keyboard problem---fixed (I think)

OK, so I took those magic 11 screws out of my computer. I did this by buying a screwdriver, getting Tamzin to look after Joel, turning my computer off, closing the lid, removing the battery, turning the computer upside-down so that I could see the 11 screws, and then starting. The orientation of the computer when I turned it upside-down was such that the words "LOCK" and "UNLOCK", referring to the places which lock/unlock the battery, were upside-down. I dismantled from left to right, so the first screw I removed was quite near the headphone/mike outputs, the ninth was by the button which rotates but doesn't do anything, and the tenth was by the power-on switch. This brings us to the 11th, which floored me for a while because I couldn't get it out for a good few minutes! The 11th screw is the one near the ethernet-or-whatever-it-is input and the fan. I didn't want to push down too hard because I didn't want to smash the screen of the monitor; on the other hand, I seemed to be destroying the screw at the beginning---ruining the screw head instead of rotating it, which didn't look so great. After a while I got it to budge but even then it was non-trivial to get it out: even after the initial movement, the screw did not move freely. After some coaxing I got it out. The screw was clearly different from the others: it was blackened at the bottom and was obviously slightly damaged. Having done all this I was interested in the state of the keyboard so I kept the computer turned over and opened up the monitor. I don't recommend this: the monitor opened and the keyboard fell out onto the table, together with a piece of metal. Having cursed my stupidity at not guessing that things perhaps would not be as joined together as usual after having removed 11 screws, I decided not to take the back of the computer off, but to leave it in the state it was. I turned the computer over and worked out what had happened. The piece of metal appeared to be a heat sink and the word "UP" was written on it; I was now sitting with the computer opened and oriented as if I were using it. I put the piece of metal back so that the word UP was face up and upright :-) and it fitted nicely over two chips. Now the computer looked normal, except the pieces of plastic on the sides were kind of falling out, and the keyboard was off. My first piece of relief was that I realised that I had misguessed what was happening: underneath the delete and backspace keys there was *nothing* important at all that I was continually bashing whenever I pressed them; there was just plastic/metal/whatever it is. So I realised that I probably hadn't (yet) done the computer any damage unless I'd damaged the keyboard (I was worried that when the keyboard was "loose", I was smashing into a chip or something, whenever I pressed the delete key). >From the bottom of the keyboard it was clear that the troublesome 11th screw was holding the keyboard _down_ and that in fact the reason the keyboard was "giving" slightly at the top RH corner was that it was about 1mm too _high_. I then simply put everything back together, exactly as it had originally been, except that I put the damaged screw in the unique hole which could reasonably be called "the middle hole" and I put the screw from the middle hole back into the RH centre hole, the one near the fan. Then the keyboard was back to normal and the computer seems to work fine, and the problem looks solved to me.

My conclusion: leaving my VAIO on for about 10 days straight computing modular forms and hence processing _hard_ has kept the fan on "high power" and has kept the computer running slightly hot (start up a long and complicated magma calculation, leave it for a while, and then kill it and listen: the speed at which the fan is going decreases noticeably!). Not only did we have this 10 day marathon; I have basically left my VAIO on doing very CPU-intensive things ever since the 26th June or so, which was about 3 weeks ago, only rarely switching it off---usually it's on all day and all night. The resulting heat seems to have mildly damaged this 11th screw with the result that it wasn't holding the keyboard down correctly any more. Perhaps in retrospect, if I'd known this was the problem, I would have just removed this one screw and put in a new one. It frightens me slightly though: if this is the damage caused to a screw by leaving the computer on for 3 weeks, what else have I damaged? There is in fact no indication that I've damaged anything else, and the screw was only mildly "charred", it wasn't completely melted or anything, but it was distorted enough to make it hard to remove.

I am now in a slight quandary: I really want to leave my VAIO on all the time, but I don't want to damage it any further. What do you think?

Kevin

Sound card fell out (A little adventure in Paris)

Subject: A little adventure in Paris...
From: "William A. Stein" 
Date: Sun, 25 Jun 2000 06:36:31 +0000

I spent Saturday working on research in my hotel room in Paris. You would think nothing interesting might happen, but something interesting did. I was using my new laptop to listen to mp3's when suddenly the left speaker died. By pressing on the speaker, it seemed to work for a moment. Then it totally died. Then the right speaker died too! Argh! However, the headphone jack still worked, so I used headphones for a while. Then the headphone jack died as well. I'm in the middle of a long professional trip, which depends heavily on my laptop working and it has just broke.

I swear to myself that I won't take apart my laptop and try to fix it. I don't want to break it any worse, as I depend on it. Also I don't have any tools like a solder iron. Then I spy the knife my dad gave me as a graduation gift, and my resolve breaks. I take apart the computer carefully, and poke around for a while. I discover a wafer-thin card below where my left palm usually sits while typing, and it seems loose. It is not plugged in well! I plug it in harder, and start the computer up. Sound works! It works so well I hear fireworks outside.

Fireworks. I peer out the window and see a giant fireworks display in southeast Paris. -- William

Another Sound card fell out

sony vaio sound card fallout
From: Samuel DeWitt Montgomery-Blinn 
 To: [email protected]
 Date: Wed, 19 Sep 2001 02:52:28 +0000

just wanted to drop a note thanking you for your web page.

my wife's Z505JS started having weird sound problems - the internal speakers didn't work, but the headphones worked fine. then the headphones stopped working too... and a web search (google of course) led me to your page and your 'note from paris'.

it helped me fight the fear of wreaking havoc on the little parts of the vaio and start hacking into it. sure enough, part of the sound card came unplugged and after pushing it back in, everything was great.

also, at least on her vaio, you can unplug the keyboard by releasing a little lock and move it out of the way.

however a couple tiny little tabs became broken - perhaps a 'howto' of vaio disassembly would be in order?

1. note these directions are for sony vaio z505js. if you follow them and break your computer/electrocute yourself don't come crying to me.
2. unscrew all bottom screws.
3. raise monitor and lift back of keyboard.
4. release keyboard lock and put keyboard out of harm's way.
5. unscrew the screw which the keyboard had been hiding underneath near the center of its top.
6. open the monitor all the way, so the laptop is fully opened.
7. press the bottoms of the small pieces covering the monitor hinge and pull them up and out.
8. slide each of the speaker cover panels to the side.
9. unscrew the screw next to each speaker.
10. gently lift the panel - be careful of
    1. speaker wires
    2. touchpad connector
    3. monitor connector
    4. anything else dangling between your panel and the motherboard
11. underneath where your left hand sits while typing is a small riser board which has probably either completely or partially come out of its socket. gently push it back in.
12. put it all back together.

i wish i had brought my webcam home from work to document the process. there was some interesting hardware in there!

thanks again for your page, i found it very helpful.

-sam

[email protected]

Recreating the Hibernation File and Partition

Re: my win disk
From: Kevin Buzzard 
To: "William A. Stein" 
Date: Wed, 1 Aug 2001 21:37:19 +0100 (BST)

> Are there notes somewhere that summarize what you did?

Unfortunately, what I did was surely a superset of what needed to be done.

I can simply tell you the relevant parts though, and you can edit them if necessary.

***

The problem I had, I caused myself. To cut a long story short, I deleted the Win95 FAT32 partition on my VAIO because I was finding that I was simply never booting into windows, and I reformatted it as a linux partition. As a result, suspend-to-disk ceased to work. There are web pages explaining why this slightly annoying thing happens, for example