My laptop, an HP pavilion 4200ze, stopped working at the exact same time I bought a new workstation. I had to develop a little program in C# using Microsoft Visual Studio and it simply would not run on my old desktop. The laptop is running Mandriva and it was out of question to reformat it and install Windows. Besides, I had no guarantee it would work.

So, instead I bought a new computer and that is the moment the laptop chose to stop working. It simply would not boot. I would have fixed it long ago, unfortunately, the CD drive had stopped working properly for a while already. It usually would not load home made CDs. It is therefore impossible to run the installation DVD to fix it without 1st changing the DVD drive.

The only issue is that it is a special model of CD/DVD drive and quite impossible to find. :-( HP site lists it fir the reasonable price of CAD 401.00. I'll pass.

So now we are going to install a simple CD drive and try to fix the OS from an install CD which I need to download from Mandrica as I only have the DVD version. So complicated.

Anyway, we'll see how that goes.