- Jul 30, 2014
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I have an old Toshiba Portege R500-S5006V (from 2008) that I want to give to my brother after I got my new Satellite E55t-A5320. The reason I got this new one in January is that the Portege would crash if I moved the screen in any way. This past week, I tried to resurrect the laptop to give to my brother, who was using an IBM ThinkPad X31 (yes, an IBM) running Windows XP, of course very dangerous on the net.
The specs are as follows:
Intel Core 2 Duo U7700 @ 1.33 GHz
2 GB 667 MHz DDR2 RAM
500 GB 5400 RPM Hitachi HDD
Intel GMA 950 256 MB graphics card
Now this laptop has had a history of problems. It used to be my dad's, who dropped it and broke the original 160GB 5400RPM hard drive, in addition to losing a screen hinge cover and who knows whatever else inside. The hard drive got replaced with a Hitachi 500GB 5400RPM which it still has today, and Windows 7 Pro 32-bit was installed.
I inherited this laptop in 2012 when my dad got an i7 MacBook Air. It was great until October 2013, when my school's IT guy said he would speed up my computer by increasing the size of the page file. Then, it started blue screening (the first ever for that laptop) with stop 0x7A (KERNEL_DATA_INPAGE_ERROR). Then, last December, the screen randomly faded white and I would have to force it off. And then, in January, the laptop would just turn off when I moved the screen.
This past Monday, I tried resurrecting the laptop. I realized that the screen turning off problem was due to an unlocked battery, which was literally a two-second fix. Then I was able to successfully boot into Windows 7 Professional 32-bit SP1 (build 6.1.7601). It was running very slowly, so I decided to dual-boot with Linux. I tried using Disk Management to shrink the C: partition, but that didn't work. I tried using sfc /scannow to see if corrupt files were the problem, and surely enough, it found corrupt files that it couldn't repair. I couldn't make heads or tails of the info in CBS.log, so I ended up reformatting the drive as I did not need any of the files.
Yesterday, I first installed Windows 10 Technical Preview (build 6.4.9841) without any hitches. Then, I installed Kubuntu 14.10 Plasma 5, again without any hitches. The laptop ran perfectly fine, even fast, until this morning. It booted into the GRUB menu fine, but when I tried to boot into Windows, it tried to update to the newest build (6.4.9879). This was fine by me, and I left it to sit and update. However, it turned off and again rebooted into the GRUB menu. Booting into Windows resulted in no Windows logo and a black screen, so I tried to boot into Kubuntu. This gave me a glowing Kubuntu logo like normal, but then, the screen turned off while the laptop kept running. The next time I tried to start it, it hung on the Toshiba BIOS screen for about a minute, then gave me this strange Intel Boot Agent error as follows:
Intel(R) Boot Agent GE v1.2.45
Copyright (C) 1997-2007, Intel Corporation
PXE-E61: Media test failure, check cable
PXE-M0F: Exiting Intel Boot Agent.
Insert system disk in drive.
Press any key when ready...
I thought the botched Windows update screwed the bootloader up, and tried starting from my external WD Essentials 1042 drive which had a working Windows 10 Technical Preview (build 9841) installer, and I can confirm it works since I booted my new Satellite E55t-A5320 from it. This resulted in a black screen with a flashing cursor. I tried using a Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 (build 7601) ISO with the same result. I have no certain idea of what's going on, but I think that the BIOS is screwed up. Do you think I should just give up on this and ditch it, or do you have any advice? I'm OK reformatting the drive since there's literally nothing of use on it as I wiped it yesterday. Note: I'm not a noob with computers and feel reasonably comfortable using the command line and BIOS interface.
TL;DR: My old Toshiba Portege R500-S5006V won't start from both the HDD and an external USB port after a botched Windows preview build update. It can get to the BIOS, and that's it.
The specs are as follows:
Intel Core 2 Duo U7700 @ 1.33 GHz
2 GB 667 MHz DDR2 RAM
500 GB 5400 RPM Hitachi HDD
Intel GMA 950 256 MB graphics card
Now this laptop has had a history of problems. It used to be my dad's, who dropped it and broke the original 160GB 5400RPM hard drive, in addition to losing a screen hinge cover and who knows whatever else inside. The hard drive got replaced with a Hitachi 500GB 5400RPM which it still has today, and Windows 7 Pro 32-bit was installed.
I inherited this laptop in 2012 when my dad got an i7 MacBook Air. It was great until October 2013, when my school's IT guy said he would speed up my computer by increasing the size of the page file. Then, it started blue screening (the first ever for that laptop) with stop 0x7A (KERNEL_DATA_INPAGE_ERROR). Then, last December, the screen randomly faded white and I would have to force it off. And then, in January, the laptop would just turn off when I moved the screen.
This past Monday, I tried resurrecting the laptop. I realized that the screen turning off problem was due to an unlocked battery, which was literally a two-second fix. Then I was able to successfully boot into Windows 7 Professional 32-bit SP1 (build 6.1.7601). It was running very slowly, so I decided to dual-boot with Linux. I tried using Disk Management to shrink the C: partition, but that didn't work. I tried using sfc /scannow to see if corrupt files were the problem, and surely enough, it found corrupt files that it couldn't repair. I couldn't make heads or tails of the info in CBS.log, so I ended up reformatting the drive as I did not need any of the files.
Yesterday, I first installed Windows 10 Technical Preview (build 6.4.9841) without any hitches. Then, I installed Kubuntu 14.10 Plasma 5, again without any hitches. The laptop ran perfectly fine, even fast, until this morning. It booted into the GRUB menu fine, but when I tried to boot into Windows, it tried to update to the newest build (6.4.9879). This was fine by me, and I left it to sit and update. However, it turned off and again rebooted into the GRUB menu. Booting into Windows resulted in no Windows logo and a black screen, so I tried to boot into Kubuntu. This gave me a glowing Kubuntu logo like normal, but then, the screen turned off while the laptop kept running. The next time I tried to start it, it hung on the Toshiba BIOS screen for about a minute, then gave me this strange Intel Boot Agent error as follows:
Intel(R) Boot Agent GE v1.2.45
Copyright (C) 1997-2007, Intel Corporation
PXE-E61: Media test failure, check cable
PXE-M0F: Exiting Intel Boot Agent.
Insert system disk in drive.
Press any key when ready...
I thought the botched Windows update screwed the bootloader up, and tried starting from my external WD Essentials 1042 drive which had a working Windows 10 Technical Preview (build 9841) installer, and I can confirm it works since I booted my new Satellite E55t-A5320 from it. This resulted in a black screen with a flashing cursor. I tried using a Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 (build 7601) ISO with the same result. I have no certain idea of what's going on, but I think that the BIOS is screwed up. Do you think I should just give up on this and ditch it, or do you have any advice? I'm OK reformatting the drive since there's literally nothing of use on it as I wiped it yesterday. Note: I'm not a noob with computers and feel reasonably comfortable using the command line and BIOS interface.
TL;DR: My old Toshiba Portege R500-S5006V won't start from both the HDD and an external USB port after a botched Windows preview build update. It can get to the BIOS, and that's it.
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