Black line on screen

[Carrot]

I think I've just broken my psion, although I don't know how.. earlier today I turned it on, it came up with a blank screen / single black line, and it beeped at me, and when I tried to turn it on again it actually powered up. It did this a few times, and now whenever it has it's main batteries in, the screen displays a single black line (no more beeping), and the machine doesn't respond to power or power off commands.. the line goes away when the main batteries are removed. I'm hoping there's a way to recover from this problem; there's quite a bit of data on there that's not backed up (no access to the right pc for a couple of weeks..) and I'd really like to be able to save it.. any suggestions?

Oh yeah, there's a picture of it at http://www.groovycarrot.co.uk/psiondead.jpg

Your help is very greatly appreciated..

[MikeMcC]

The line goes away when you remove the main batteries because the backup battery doesn't have enough power to run the display.

Try pressing Ctrl-Fn-Shift-K which will "kill" a crashed application. If that doesn't work, try a soft reset. If neither of these help, you will have to perform a hard reset with the loss of all internal data.

If a hard reset doesn't fix it, you have a hardware fault (probably the screen cable) which will require repair.

[Carrot]

Thanks for the advice - just one question though, I don't have the handbook for this and I haven't had it all that long, how do you perform a hard / soft reset?

[MikeMcC]

To soft reset open the backup battery compartment and press something like an unbent paperclip gently into the little hole beside the backup battery. Then close the compartment and switch on by pressing the [Esc] key, being careful not to touch any other key at the same time.

To hard reset follow the above procedure but switch on by holding down both shift keys and pressing [Esc].

[Carrot]

The soft reset worked to the extent that I can now turn it on, but the screen seems to be suffering somewhat.. I think I must have knocked at some point yesterday...

Thanks for the help, it's at least at the stage now where I can back everything up in case it dies completely.

[Carrot]

Oddly, having got it to start up this morning and left it here all day, it now appears to be working absolutely perfectly, no corruption or black lines anywhere. Guess it's just a loose connection that's fallen back into place..
Thanks again for the advice :)