Solved! Toshiba laptop (P875) HDD doesn't boot but readable.

[sdash]

• Toshiba P875 HDD doesn't boot. I did nothing with the laptop of late. It just happened. I keep getting --no bootable drive. please restart system.
• I followed websites to go into BIOS - security disable, change system configuration stuff, verify boot order etc. nothing worked.
• I was not sure where the problem was - whether my HDD was gone, or it was something else.
• Now, I don't have a windows PC with a working USB (work one has them disabled). So just ordered a SATA-USB cable and with it I hooked up the HDD to my windows tablet thing which had a USB and I can see the files in the HDD. So apparently the files are ok.
• I don't understand why the HDD has files fine but won't boot...?

Anyway now from reading all the info I can, I am trying to create a USB bootable stick so I can get the laptop to boot up. Of course that is now a challenge as the only other PC I have is a work one that has USB disabled. However, I am asking my friends for a windows pc + usb working..

Assuming I can get that, and I create a USB bootable stick.. I also got a bigger HDD and was thinking of somehow cloning the unbootable HDD into the new large one and use that somehow to get things going. Now my laptop also has 2 HDD drive bays, so somehow if I could get the unbootable one to just be able to read/write data, I could use that for storage...

Please let me know what I could do and why is this even happening, HDD fine but unbootable? Appreciate your help.

 

[helpstar]

Use the usb windows installation to repair the os boot
Set the boot priority to the hdd

 

[sdash]

Thanks.. working to create that usb boot stick..

But one question I now have is.. I was going to clone the broken HDD to the new one I got and use the new one as the main HDD.. would cloning it then also copy over the problems in the new HDD? I can copy over the data but I read that there are cloning programs that can create the whole clone - os and data.. and if so then would my problems persist in the new HDD?

Please advise the right and most painless way to get back up and running without loss of data and need to reinstall programs. Thanks

 

[sdash]

Ok team, I created the win 10 usb used it to load win 10 into the new HDD. Then started it up and it worked fine. I then just for kicks put the older ‘broken’ HDD into the second slot (it has 2 bays) and I can see both drives. Now the kicker is when I change the boot sequence to try and boot from the older broken drive - it works! It takes some time but it boots, but then why it didn’t do that earlier is beyond me..

... so now I have 2 HDD with win 10 in the same laptop. I don’t want to risk going back to the old HDD so my thinking is to use the new one going forward and I will leave the older one there as a storage etc

.. now the problem is when I try to open the folder in the older drive (shows up as E in the laptop) it complains saying I don’t have access or permissions to it.. not sure what this means.. but I confirmed to the prompt that I want full access and it then has the green bar at the top slowly swiping through forever. I guess it is granting permissions to all sub folder and files but even after it is done when I try to get into the folder I get the same prompt!

I don’t have multiple users for the laptop. It’s just me and I have the user set up - I had one set up while using the older drive as the primary drive and now I have this one for the new drive. Both are the same msft account user. So what do I need to do to get full access across everything?

.. I want to set up msft backup working across both the drives now but this access issue may prevent things from working right.

Please advise.

 

[helpstar]

Probably your HDD boot section was repaired by windows itself and just needed to restart with the correct boot priority or the HDD was not recognized because it had no proper connection to the sata/power port. Or it´s faulty. Check the HDD with its manufacturer´s tool.

To get access you will need to get ownership of the files and folders with admin rights. The "new" old account user doesn´t have access because it´s not the owner of the files, whether it´s the same name or Microsoft account.