Some maintenance work later, three HDDs have been installed in a variety of devices, and a laptop battery has been replaced.
Also Acer, what's wrong with you? Why would you design a laptop with a harddrive "bay" that just has the drive dangle freely from the SATA connector on the edge of the motherboard with no mechanical support whatsoever?!
(One of the devices with a new HDD is the mini PC thing that I'll be taking to #WHY2025 to run a copyparty server on!)
Also about that Acer laptop, I ended up having to install fire-resistant EVA foam pads on *both* sides of the drive to have it not flap around inside of the bay, and because the design is absurd and the 'drive caddy' (bit of flexible plastic with some screw holes on the side...) is missing, I also had to tape some reused packaging plastic over the underside of the drive because otherwise it would risk touching the metal shielding that is directly next to it.
I don't think I've ever had to do so much trashgoblining to install a drive into a laptop before, what the hell.
