I had an old, broken Dell XPS 13 9360 sitting around for quite some time. It was a computer that I really liked, but I dropped it off a table at one point, and the hinge of the monitor broke so badly that it became unusable. Anyhow, I didn’t want to throw it away, because aside from the case, it was perfectly fine.

What I did was buy a second broken Dell XPS 13 9360 on eBay for $161. This sat on my nightstand unopened for quite a while, waiting for me to find a chance to roll up my sleeves and mess with the hardware. I finally got around to tackling this last night.

The first thing I did was try to put the SSD from the original machine into the new one (which came with no hard drive). This may have worked, but I didn’t get to find out, because the fan wasn’t working. The machine wouldn’t boot, and complained loudly and angrily about the fan.

Replacing the fan was a bigger task. I first had to take out the battery (pretty easy) and the motherboard (less easy). I ultimately reassembled the laptop using the battery, fan and motherboard from the old machine, which I had more confidence in. I wired it all up again and expected it not to work :) But it booted!

But at this point the rebuilt machine didn’t recognize the SSD. I’m not sure why. Perhaps because I restored the factory settings in the BIOS? (I may be totally wrong about this; it is just a guess.) Anyhow, I was able to boot into an initramfs recovery shell, and I could get the SSD working again by running fsck (file system check) from the shell. I could then install Debian 12 from a USB drive and my “new” machine was up and running!

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