Disassemble Travelmate 2350

Hi

Would anyone be able to help with my Travelmate 2350 problems? The hard drive doesn't work and I can't open it

If I try and boot from the HD it just hangs.
If I try and boot from a Ubuntu live CD it hangs while initialising the partitions (trying to read the hard drive)
If I take the HD out and replace it with another one from another laptop it reboots while trying to install Windows XP (and gives a STOP error indicating a problem with reading from HD). Also there's a constant tapping noise coming from the HD caddy area as the laptop tries to initialise the HD and can't manage to (I'm assuming)
If I use Spinrite with either HD it doesn't detect any HD
If I take the HD out completely and just use a Ubuntu Live CD it works perfectly (I'm using remote desktop from it right now to post this message)

The questions I need a hand with are
1) How do I take it apart (I'm buying a 2nd hand mother board off eBay and I want to try and replace it). I've undone all the screws but it doesn't come apart. Basically there's something still holding it together near the center of the laptop
2) Any idea what might be wrong from the symptoms described above?

Thanks in advance for any help

 

* bumping this post

 

all of the symptons you describe are hard drive related, i assume the other drive you tried was known to be working fine?

You need to remove the middle cover above the keyboard where the hinges are, then unscrew the keyboard and remove that, there you will see more screws and the heatsink module; you will need to remove the heatsink module and the screws, you will also have to remove the display module from the unit in order to take it apart, also bear in mind that you should remove the optical as there are normally screws consealed by the optical drive.

Also the clips that hold the covers together are quite strong and may take some pulling to separate.