Standard desktop PCs are simple to open and dismantle. Laptops are significantly harder but at least have hatches for access to batteries, hard drives and memory. The new mini Netbooks are as difficult as laptops and often don’t even have the hatches on the bottom, you can usually remove the battery easily enough but what about the hard drive? Well if you happen to have a Toshiba NB100 Notebook hopefully this guide will help you out.

Introduction

The other evening a friend of mine brought around an NB100 netbook that wouldn’t recognise it’s hard drive in it’s BIOS. So obviously we wanted to remove the hard drive to test it in an external USB caddy on another PC, this way we could decide whether the fault was with the hard drive or the Netbook’s main board storage controller. Unfortunately there’s no hatch for easy removal of the hard drive and so we set out on a journey to open the NB100.

At the moment I don’t have any useful photos of the process so I’ll try to describe the steps as best I can and then if I do actually get to take some photos, I’ll upload them into the article for added clarity. If anything is difficult to understand feel free to ask questions using the comments section at the bottom of this page.

Time for a short disclaimer. I cannot guarantee any part of this disassembly, you will probably void any remaining warranty on the product by following this guide and I take absolutely no responsibility for any damage or injury resulting in following this guide. If you find a mistake or get into problems though, please let me know and I will amend or help out appropriately.

During disassembly you will come across pieces of black tape and two grey sticky pads. The pads are heat transfer pads and need to be positioned on top of the CPU and main board chipset chips for chip cooling purposes. The black tape is electrical insulation tape and is placed across exposed connectors to prevent short circuiting. DO NOT try fit to turn the netbook back on with either the pads or the tape missing, in fact if you loose the tape or pads and need to wait for spares it’ll be safer to leave the battery out completely until the netbook is properly assembled.

If you loose or damage a thermal pad you can buy some equivalents here – thermal pad and black insulation tape is here – black insulation tape

Stage One

Start off with the easy and obvious things. Remove the battery by sliding the two battery release buttons and pulling the battery off, this is important as it’s the equivalent of unplugging a desktop PC and you don’t want to be working on a ‘live’ PC. Then unscrew the small hatch on the base and remove the hatch completely, this will reveal the memory. The memory can then be released by pushing the metal clips outwards and lifting the memory until it reaches an angle where it’ll just pop out. At first this seems a bit odd and you have a scary moment thinking you’re about to snap your memory module but the clipping system actually works quite well.

Another obvious thing to remove while we have the Netbook upside down is all of the visible screws. There are four longer one’s towards the rear of the casing and smaller screws for the rest. All of the screws are visible and there should be no need to remove any stickers to find them although some may sit quite a long way down the moulded holes.

Stage Two

So now on to the less obvious parts. Turn the netbook back over so that the keyboard is pointing upwards and using a wide but relatively sharp flat blade screwdriver insert it under the panel just above the keyboard. You need to be inserting just above the ‘F1′ and ‘F2′ keys on the left side and just above the ‘F12′ and ‘Pause/Break’ keys on the right hand side. When you have the screwdriver inserted you should be able to lever the panel above the keyboard off at the keyboard side. It will still remain fixed at the monitor/hinge side but when you open the monitor fully it should now be possible to lift this panel up as a flap.

With this flap raised you’ll now see two screws on each side, the silver coloured ones hold the monitor hinges to the main body and the black ones just below hold the keyboard down via two tabs. Remove the keyboard screws and the keyboard should lift up off the netbook frame as one complete piece. Be careful as you remove the keyboard as it is connected underneath by a short ribbon cable to the main board and you don’t really want to be damaging this!

To remove the ribbon cable safely you will need to push a small flat bladed screwdriver or a thumb nail underneath the tiny black bar and flip it up. This will release the ribbon cable and it should now pull away with ease.

Stage Three

With the keyboard removed you’ll see the mini network card toward the top right of the casing. This is held down by a single screw and has a pair of connectors which can be prised off, these just push back on for re-assembly. The network card’s cables run through a channel up to the monitor on the right and there’s a channel on the left for the monitor’s cables. You will need to remove the monitor connector from the main board, I removed the network card and released the cables from the channels too but I’m not sure if this is absolutely necessary, unless of course it’s the network card you’re replacing.

With the cables out of the way you can now remove the screws that hold down the main cover. This is the trickiest part of the disassembly as you need to release the clips around the sides and then lift the cover away taking care to not loose the heat transfer pads stuck between this cover and the CPU/Chipset on the main board. To release the clips I advise using a credit card or similar as this will slot into the gap between the top cover and the base, you can then slide the card along to release the clips all the way round. The cover is aluminium underneath and acts as the CPU and chipset heatsink for keeping these chips cool and stable.

Stage Four

From here you can access the hard drive which is held in a caddy down at the bottom left. You need to unscrew the caddy and lift this away making sure that the drive comes away from it’s SATA connector safely. Once the caddy has been removed then you can then remove the screws that hold the hard drive into the caddy and disassembly is complete.

With this disassembly you can now replace the memory, hard drive, keyboard or network card which is all you’ll ever need to do on a netbook like this. You cannot remove the CPU as it is integrated into the main board, as is the graphics chip.

Final Comments

This is a relatively easy disassembly and the Toshiba NB100 netbook looks pretty well put together. Reassembly is obviously a reverse of the disassembly making sure that the heat transfer pads are in place properly, all ribbon cables are locked down and securely fastened and that any of the insulation tape is back in place to prevent components shorting out.

Hopefully this guide has been of help and if you want any advice regarding replacement parts then please make a comment below and I’ll reply asap.

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