ACER 5920 Rear Cover Removal

I have a 5920 that is just out of warranty and want to upgrade the 160 gig HD with a 500 gig WD. The 5920 is a wonderful machine and working fine. Looked like a five minute job to remove the ram/HD cover by removing the 7 screws visible on my rear cover. But, it wouldn't come off, felt like more screws were possibly under the MS Vista label on the cover. A web search resulted in a downloaded manual for the 5920 that said "remove 9 screws". No screws shown under the label. Looking around some more, I see 2 small "indents", for lack of a better word, that could hide the 2 missing screws. Were these 2 "indents" effectively "tamper-proof" plugs? Looking at this site, I see that others were removing 9 screws but it was also noted that the cover had to be "carefully" pried off after that. No mention of plugs. From a photo someone posted, it looks like the "indents" I see are at about the same location as 2 of the HD mounting screws. So, maybe ACER changed the design so that these two screws don't come off with the back cover anymore. Maybe the 2 "indents" I see are not "plugs" but simply undrilled holes so I only need to remove 7, not 9 screws and then do the prying. Questions: Does anyone know if these two "indents" are tamper-proof plugs or just undrilled holes? Then, I would like to know more about this "prying". What is being pried upon? A picture would be good. The back cover pictures I've seen here and in the repair manual do not show what must be pried upon. Thanks for any help. I would prefer not to break the rear panel as I'm sure a replacement part will cost a fortune. Gary

 

There are 9 screws, 2 are covered over with small black stickers, I think these are the indents you are talking about. Below is a picture with the screws highlighted. The stickers can easily be peeled off. When taking the cover off it needs prizing off gently as they are not the easiest things to take off.


orange ones have stickers over normally

 

just use a bit of force...

not enough to break plastic.... but enough to BEND it!

 

It has small clips holding it inplace as well as the screws. Just give it a pull and it will come off.

 

mine had 2 stickers over the screws ( circled in yellow in above pic )

 

Thanks to those that replied to my request for help. The post by bangert on 11-25-08 was correct, the remaining two screws were covered by stickers. I carefully removed these with a small jeweler's screwdriver which did not damage them. Maybe one would want to replace them if a machine was returned to ACER under warranty. The 9 screws are captive so they will not fall out when the cover is removed. This is great but perhaps the cause of the reported need to "pry a little" to remove the cover. Even though you have unscrewed the screws, they tend to reseat themselves in their holes. Then, when as you try to remove the cover, they resist. Rather than prying, I just continued to unscrew the previously unscrewed screws as I removed the cover and felt any resistance. There weren't any clips or anything else holding the cover down. As has been noted previously, you have to remove the cover by lifting on the "left" side per the bangert photo. The "right" side cannot come up first. Once inside, I easily changed out the drive and rebooted. I thought I would be able to get into the bios and change the boot priority from C: to the CD so I could run my Acronis True Image boot CD. But, could not. So, I just shut down and restarted with the Acronis disk in the drive. This booted ok and I did a "restore" of an image of C: that I had previously saved to an external USB drive. This was successful, but, and perhaps not unexpected, the extra space on the new, larger, hard drive was not allocated to C:. It remained "unallocated". The next thing I did was to reboot from an Acronis Disk Director boot CD and resize the C: partition to include all of the unallocated space. This was not as straightforward as it could have been but was successful. Thanks again for the help. If I couldn't get the back off, the new drive would have become an expensive, but attractive, drink coaster. Gary