A few days ago there was an unfortunate occurrence that caused a problem which I have run out of ideas to attempt to solve.
I have a Toshiba Tecra M11 laptop. The hard drive is a 320 gigabyte Hitachi.
My system was dual booting Windows 10 Technical Preview and Arch Linux. I was using Windows and it wanted to update but I was in the middle of something so I told it to wait. A few minutes later the system froze, as experimental systems sometimes do. I powered off by means of holding the power button. Upon restarting the system into Windows, it performed the Second half of the update. I worried it might have broken something, but there were no problems until the next time I booted. It went to network boot instead of grub as it normally did.
I thought maybe the update messed with my other partitions so I re-installed Arch (which is my boot partition). This had no apparent effect.
In case there was something wrong with the partition table I deleted and recreated the partition table, and installed Arch. Still no effect.
After this I thought the problem was most likely the BIOS. I went into setup and told it to restore default settings. No effect.
I powered off, removed the power cord and battery, hit the power button, removed the hard drive, replaced the power cord and battery, powered on. The BIOS did a more complete reset. I powered off, replaced the hard drive and powered on. No effect.
I got a BIOS update from here: Here. I got the same version that I already had. I re-installed the BIOS, which according to the feedback I got during installation removed the BIOS before installing the new one. No effect.
I've exhausted all the things I could think to try, so here I am. What is my next step, or have I damaged my computer irreparably?
Edit: Forgot to mention, I used gparted through a linux live usb to do partition editing, and forgot to explicitly state that only my BIOS has any trouble reading the hard drive
Update: I borrowed a friend's hard drive to test in the computer just to make absolutely sure it wasn't the hard drive, and his hard drive booted. So now I'm thinking the problem is with the hard drive. Still looking for suggestions on things to try.
I have a Toshiba Tecra M11 laptop. The hard drive is a 320 gigabyte Hitachi.
My system was dual booting Windows 10 Technical Preview and Arch Linux. I was using Windows and it wanted to update but I was in the middle of something so I told it to wait. A few minutes later the system froze, as experimental systems sometimes do. I powered off by means of holding the power button. Upon restarting the system into Windows, it performed the Second half of the update. I worried it might have broken something, but there were no problems until the next time I booted. It went to network boot instead of grub as it normally did.
I thought maybe the update messed with my other partitions so I re-installed Arch (which is my boot partition). This had no apparent effect.
In case there was something wrong with the partition table I deleted and recreated the partition table, and installed Arch. Still no effect.
After this I thought the problem was most likely the BIOS. I went into setup and told it to restore default settings. No effect.
I powered off, removed the power cord and battery, hit the power button, removed the hard drive, replaced the power cord and battery, powered on. The BIOS did a more complete reset. I powered off, replaced the hard drive and powered on. No effect.
I got a BIOS update from here: Here. I got the same version that I already had. I re-installed the BIOS, which according to the feedback I got during installation removed the BIOS before installing the new one. No effect.
I've exhausted all the things I could think to try, so here I am. What is my next step, or have I damaged my computer irreparably?
Edit: Forgot to mention, I used gparted through a linux live usb to do partition editing, and forgot to explicitly state that only my BIOS has any trouble reading the hard drive
Update: I borrowed a friend's hard drive to test in the computer just to make absolutely sure it wasn't the hard drive, and his hard drive booted. So now I'm thinking the problem is with the hard drive. Still looking for suggestions on things to try.