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| Thread ID: 127029 | 2012-09-30 08:45:00 | Toshiba satellite pro boot issues | Tbird650 (6754) | Press F1 |
| Post ID | Timestamp | Content | User | ||
| 1304205 | 2012-09-30 08:45:00 | Hi. I'm working on a Toshiba laptop for a friend. It won't boot. When a start is attempted, it tries to load PXE only and then times out. I suspect the HDD is bad or corrupt. I downloaded Ubuntu upon earlier recommendations on this forum for similar problems. It's my first time using it. The disk utility reports a 120GB HDD with good smart status. 1.6GB is allocated to NTFS, 113GB free and HDD recovery is 5.6GB. So I'm puzzling over what the 1.6GB is? Where is the OS it is supposed to have? Has a virus wiped it out? ...and how can I be 110% sure I'm not going to overwrite any information if I run the recovery partition? Can a virus hide the info? I'm just trying to be careful. Any thoughts please? Thanks. |
Tbird650 (6754) | ||
| 1304206 | 2012-09-30 09:20:00 | Hi Tbird650 Try going into bios and changing the boot order. Suggest putting HDD first, LAN last. Toshi should now boot. BURNZEE |
Burnzee (6950) | ||
| 1304207 | 2012-09-30 10:38:00 | Hi Burnzee Thanks. Had tried that. HDD is first in the boot order. Disk is a Hitachi. |
Tbird650 (6754) | ||
| 1304208 | 2012-09-30 10:52:00 | Try removing the battery & rebooting. If you can get a Bootable CD or DVD of HDD Regenerator that will tell you if you have any bad sectors or delays and can even repair a lot of bad sectors. | BigBadBob (14963) | ||
| 1304209 | 2012-09-30 11:37:00 | Thanks BBB It came without a battery so only runs with mains. I run all the disk tests in Ubuntu and it says disk is healthy. So, I'm thinking the disk is OK but for whatever reason the OS is missing... or so it seems. |
Tbird650 (6754) | ||
| 1304210 | 2012-09-30 21:53:00 | You could try this post #6 if thats the error youre seeing (www.pchelpforum.com) | Speedy Gonzales (78) | ||
| 1304211 | 2012-09-30 22:09:00 | Sounds like maybe something has stuffed up with the boot-sector. See if you can disable PXE and other boot options etc in BIOS, then you might get a useful error message when it tries to boot from the HDD. Or, go into the manual boot select menu (probably press F12) and select HDD manually. |
Agent_24 (57) | ||
| 1304212 | 2012-09-30 23:08:00 | Thanks. At boot it says there's no bootable device. PXE can't be disabled in boot menu, only order can be changed. Possibly the fixmbr etc might work but what it looks like is the partition with all that is not actually there. With only 1.6GB allocated to NTFS, that's not big enough for OS plus anything else there may have been? Rest of HDD is free or recovery section. (according to Ubuntu) Another interesting thing about this laptop is the LCD doesn't show anything till after a few attempts at startup from cold , power on/off etc , like it did this morning again. It will 'find' CD's with Ubuntu or UBCD ok once it's warmed up.... The power supply jack also isn't fixed in the casing too well. It's kind of limp and can be pushed inward a bit. |
Tbird650 (6754) | ||
| 1304213 | 2012-09-30 23:30:00 | Whoops, didn't see where you said most of the HDD was reported as free space - that is definitely odd. If you did run the recovery partition it would likely wipe out anything that isn't already gone. Might be better to scan the drive with recovery software first before you do anything else, if your friend has anything on there that's important. The screen not coming on, not sure, could be a faulty lamp, inverter, cabling or even something to do with power on the mainboard. Power jack seeming loose may not be an issue. A lot of laptops now have a jack that sits by itself on the end of a short cable, so that if you trip on the power cord and break the jack, you can easily just open the laptop, unplug the broken one and plug in a new one. This is preferable to older laptops that have the jack soldered directly to the mainboard: when the jack gets pulled on, it can damage the board as well. |
Agent_24 (57) | ||
| 1304214 | 2012-09-30 23:49:00 | If the drive is showing free space, and you know its actually got data, that can be a classic case of failed sector(s) I wouldn't go believing what ubuntu says. What you can do is slave the drive to another PC, then run a data recovery program through the Suspect Drive. Chances are you'll find your data. You can try something like Easeus Data Recovery (www.easeus.com) Select partition recovery. The Free version allows you to recover a total of 1GB, if it works and you find the data, then depending on how important it really is, pay for the Full version. I been using that a lot lately, and it works really well. |
wainuitech (129) | ||
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