Toshiba Laptop freezes before bios

[zyzz]

I have my friends laptop here and I wanted to reformat it for him. It was loaded with trojans and spyware and was just god awful slow. Crashing all the time, etc.

Anyway yesterday I popped in the windows XP disk and started formatting. It got to 56% and froze there. I left it for 1 hour but it was frozen for sure.

I propped up the computer so it could get some air flow. I have had laptops that need good air circulation while formatting otherwise they do freeze. Anyway, I tried again but I couldn't even get it to boot.

The main screen "In Touch with Tomorrow - TOSHIBA" in red is the only thing you see.

There is a little blue bar that loads halfway, then nothing.

F2 is bios, F12 is boot options. If I press F2 it says "Please wait..." but nothing ever happens.

F12 I can't get the boot menu.

I reseated the RAM, but it's still not working.

Suggestions?

 

[nhasian]

yes time to replace the laptop.

 

[zyzz]

LOL. That's not going to look very good after I told him I would fix and clean it up. It WAS working, although terribly.

It's a piece of junk like most Toshiba's, but what else can I try?

 

[zyzz]

managed to get into bios spamming escape key then f2 quickly.

Bios is not recognizing a hard drive.

I got Windows XP cd to load and it says there is no hard drive.

Is the HD dead?

Anything I can try?

 

[funguseater]

Hi

If its a sata drive you can just pop the HDD into your PC and format the drive.
Put the HDD back into laptop and install normally.

Other than that you could (google) download "Hiren's Boot CD" and play around with the HDD recovery/Formatting options. Check HDD for errors and such...

Good Luck
Fungi

 

[zyzz]

I will give it a shot, but now I can't even attempt to get the Windows XP disk going again.

Basically at that Toshiba screen you can...

F2 for bios which stays as "Please Wait" forever..
F12 for boot menu - nothing happens.
Spam Escape and get lucky for another chance at bios. Basically Phoenix Technologies screen.

Got to Bios a couple of times, no hard drive shown, set boot to CD, won't boot to CD.

Gonna format it in my computer.

 

[zyzz]

I installed the SATA drive into my computer but it's not showing up.

No where to been seen in Disk Managment - scanned multiple times.

Nothing in my computer or shown up as new hardware.

Should I try Hiren's Boot CD or is this HD dead for sure?

 

[zyzz]

anyone?

 

[zyzz]

still need help.

 

[zyzz]

if there are any other tests I can do before I put it in the garbage and tell my friend he has to buy a new one.