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Hard drive failure or software failure? (1 Viewer)

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michael23

Well-known member
Hi everyone, im wondering if any of you can help point me in the right direction here. My brother has a toshiba satellite a200 1a1 laptop running vista premium. Has been running fine, perhaps a little slow, but last night it froze whilst on internet explorer saying internet explorer has encountered a problem and needs to close, the laptop then displayed a blue screen which said something along these lines..."windows has encounted a serious error and will shutdown....." now when the laptop switches on all that is available is the normal start up screen (black with toshibas logo) and there are the options of f2 to enter setup and f12 to enter boot selections. If either of these keys are pressed it says please wait at the bottom of the screen and nothing happens at all. During this if esc is pressed it runs into a total black screen, ctrl alt and del wont restart the laptop, and wont run recovery disc from the cd drive either. There is no mouse pointer on the screen, nor will f8 work to enter safe mode,
So anyone got any ideas weather this could be hard drive failure or a serious fault with windows vista, unless a virus has corrupted the system?
 
It sounds very much to me like a hard drive failure I'm afraid.

Look in the bios and see if the hard drive is recognised.

Boot the system up and hold down the‘Esc’ key, then press F1 when you get the check system message. You are then in the BIOS Setup and you can make your changes and save and exit by pressing the ‘End’ key.
 
hi howard have tried the optin you mentioned, and no joy at all no message appears at all and if f1 is pressed it just creates a beep.
 
That's strange, it should have worked.

Power off the laptop and press and hold the escape key. Power on the laptop while still holding the escape key keeping the escape key held down and see if that helps.
 
michael23;1797729now when the laptop switches on all that is available is the normal start up screen (black with toshibas logo) and there are the options of f2 to enter setup and f12 to enter boot selections. If either of these keys are pressed it says please wait at the bottom of the screen and nothing happens at all.[/QUOTE said:
Howard_Hopkinso said:
It sounds very much to me like a hard drive failure I'm afraid.

Look in the bios and see if the hard drive is recognised.
Click to expand...

The bios on the Tosh is accessed by pressing F2, and Michael says that don't work. So it sounds like it may be more drastic than that. The fact that it also refuses to boot from CD also points to something other than a hard drive problem.

I found some instructions on the net for resetting Satellite bios chips -

Follow these steps:

* Remove Laptop Battery
* Remove Memory Cover
* Spread spring clips to outside and
* pull out RAM memory
* Remove clear vinyl label opposite RAM memory slots
* In the upper left corner you will see JOPEN1 with a white silkscreen square

Inside the square you will see what looks like the letter T over a U. Using a metal paper clip short the U to the Silver 1/4"post connecting the motherboard to the laptop case and hold it for 25 -30 seconds. Place back your RAM memory, put in the laptop battery and test start laptop. you should see a selection of F1 or F2 for setup. Using the F2 gets you into the Bios menu where you reset the time and date.
Click to expand...

If nothing else works then it's probably worth trying this before junking it.
Click to expand...
 
unfortunately been unable to locate anything that matches what frank posted, but it may be undeneath the casing, i removed every single screw and it would not all come off, so a brick wall. Will probably buy a hard drive caddy with usb to see if the hard drive can be accessed.
 
hi again, i justed wanted to say thanks again for the help, my brother decided to ring toshiba, who said they were 99% sure it was a motherboard failure! So a really big ouch there, so hopefully i can rescue the photos off the hard drive..
 
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