Toshiba Qosmio nightmare

This laptop is a Qosmio F15-AV201. It was originally loaded with WinXP-MCE and the owner tried to upgrade to Vista. He attempted it 3 different times and somehow managed to mess it up at about 85% of the way through. He brought it to me. I finished the Vista install (it was in the middle of the 4th try when he gave it to me). But there's no Vista drivers at Toshiba's web site. So I looked for drivers elsewhere, and found only one, for the video. So I said lets go back to XP. After the 3 aborted upgrades, none of the installed programs would work anyhow, and they didn't even show up when I finally got Vista loaded. Anyway, I backed up all his pics, docs, music, etc. Formatted, and installed XP-MCE. Now I've installed most of the drivers, but there's still an Unknown Device in the device manager, and several of the important Toshiba drivers will not install (like the Common Modules; if you know about Toshiba Laptops, you know how important this driver is). Without the common module driver, several other drivers won't install, like the power saver driver, and without that, you can't use hot keys for controlling brightness, contrast, etc... on top of everything else the BIOS is set for an external display by default so you have to press Fn+F5 every time the PC is turned on to get anything on the display. I've tried changing it, but it gives BIOS checksum error when you change ANYTHING in the BIOS. So, I tried to flash the BIOS from an ISO burned to CD (yes, I know how to burn ISO images). It doesn't even see anything on the CD, when the CD is in a different PC, everything is there.... Otherwise the CD drive seems OK. It reads other discs, and burns OK. And on top of all that, the recovery disks don't work! It comes up with a "WRONG MACHINE!" error..... :banghead :cry WTF is up with this?!?!?!
HELP!

Sorry for the long post, but I had to explain EVERYTHING!

 

Not knowing much about XP MCE, I'll ask if there is a compatibility mode to run XP or even Vista apps. I don't remember where it was (I'll look and try to find it) but I got a poster to load a driver that way. I'm pretty sure it involved running the setup.exe in compatible mode. I'll post back once I find it.

It was simpler than I remembered. Of course, you won't choose Win98.

Don't know if that'll help, but worth a try.

 

Thanks, I hadn't even thought of that, but Vista's gone, and we're back with XP. The more I work on this, the more I think the BIOS is corrupt. About 5 minutes ago, I downloaded a new BIOS from the Toshiba web site, hooked up the USB floppy drive and booted to the BIOS flash disk. Again I was told that the BIOS is for a different model. When I put in the recovery CDs (either from Windows or booting to 'em) they also tell me that they are for a different model. Even though the model on printed on the CDs is the same as the model number on the bottom of the PC.... corrupt BIOS?

 

That's beyond me, dlb. I stay away from the BIOS because I know you can really mess up a system that way and I tend to err the wrong way on things like that.
Good Luck.

 

Well, I tried flashing the BIOS. It stopped before it really started saying "This BIOS file is for Toshiba Model F10. This PC is Toshiba model F10 and is not compatible." Yes, it says the F10 BIOS is not compatible with the F10 laptop. Even though the BIOS file was download from the Toshiba site for the F15 laptop, and the model on the bottom of the PC says F15-AV201.... so I'm stuck. Drivers won't load. The BIOS won't flash. I have to press Fn+F5 at power up just to get the display working.... :banghead I have the rest of the weekend to figure this out, or give it back to it's owner and tell him that he's got a problem.... I just hate to admit defeat!!!

 

I just had a guy bring me his toshiba qosmio g35-av600 since im basically my platoons tech support and i'm trying to fix this thing it gets the "wrong machine" error when i try changing the boot order in the bios to run off just the recovery disk and when i do let the computer completely start up its missing basically all of its visual user interfaces, i got task manager and that's it. i tried flashing a new bios from toshiba after i found this forum post thanks to google and i cant seem to get it to work so i was curious is this something i need to get like a hard drive wiper and a new OS? or should i just wash my hands of this pos and hand it over to geek squad?