09-04-2015, 02:06 AM
Sorry everyone; the laptop's toast. Yes, it had only 256 MB of RAM. But my friend and I had little prior experience with disassembling laptops, and we didn't even recognize the empty RAM bank underneath the memory cover as a RAM bank. As a result, we disassembled the laptop from the wrong side (bottom instead of keyboard), and eventually ended up with a screw that turned just fine, but wouldn't leave its hole. So after quite a while of struggling, we gave up on trying to keep the laptop workable and just tore it apart, trying to salvage what we could. (And we did end up recovering a lot of parts that could work in other laptops.) The disassembly, though, did teach us a great deal, and the laptop, as said before, was a very old one (10 years) that we could afford to destroy. We even recovered the installation CD from the CD drive, which I stupidly didn't open before starting to disassemble the laptop. Thanks to everyone for their assistance and advice. I will be doing more of this (installing LL on old laptops) in the future, and if I run into problems with Linux Lite, I'll know where to go for help.