Toshiba Satellite Laptop

Hello,

I used to work as a Desktop Computer Technician some years back and have built many a Desktop computer for friends. I am also aware that Laptops and Desktops are two completely different items and completely understand that things do change and this has me baffled. http://forums.majorgeeks.com/images/smilies/confused.gif

A friend of mine has a Toshiba Satellite Laptop (year built: 2004/05) and it was working fine until one day when the monitor turned all black with an Underscore blinking.

She said when you powered it back on it went to the Welcome Toshiba screen and then it will go blank with the blinking line.

She tried to use the Operating CD to reinstall the OS and got to the screen and tells you to remove all disks and Cd's and reboot the Laptop, you do that and it comes back to the black screen with the blinking line and does nothing else.

Through asking questions to her, I did find out that she had virus's and spy ware on the laptop before all this started happening. (Just by her telling me what was popping up on the screen before it went blank). http://forums.majorgeeks.com/images/smilies/duck.gif

NOTE: ****One thing gets me is she swears this Laptop has Windows XP on it, when you insert the OS CD it says starting Windows 98. When I went to delete the partition it was not formatted to either FAT32 or NTFS... I now forget what the format was, but it took me forever to delete the non windows partition, but this might because of the issues she has had trying to reinstall the OS...I think I remember Windows XP always being NTFS....

So I manually deleted the partition, formatted the hard drive (when I checked to see which format it was AFTER I formatted it ... it showed up as FAT32) and then I rebooted the Laptop and the CD decided to delete and reinstall the partition and reformat the hard drive, which is something that I have not seen happen before. I did not recheck the partition to see if it was still FAT32 or NTFS as I wanted to see if it would continue to reinstall...

But once it gets to the screen and it tells you to remove all disks and Cd's and reboot the Laptop, you do that and it comes back to the black screen with the blinking line and does nothing else.

Well after this, she went home and had another one of her friends looked at the hard drive he said there is no problem with the hard drive. He said the only issue he can think of is that the motherboard connection must be corrupt and not communicating and if that is the issue, there is no solution.

She said "he took the hard drive out of the Laptop and put in a box and used USB cable to connect and looked at the hard drive and he confirms that it is working well."

Any Suggestions??

 

The first thing to ascertain is whether there is a hardware issue and to this end I would suggest using a Linux Live CD. I would suggest Puppy Linux personally (small download 95Mb). If the laptop is about 4-5 years old perhaps a slightly older version of Puppy will work better (v3.x and use the retro one). I would try v4.x retro first though.

The Puppy file is an ISO which you burn to CD. Set 1st boot device in bios as optical. If bios access is not possible then just boot without the hard drive if necessary.

Puppy Linux is a full o/s and will load in ram. If Puppy loads then you will get to a desktop and for all intend HW issues can be removed from the equation.

Not sure perhaps it started life as 98SE and the o/s was upgraded to XP later on.

Good Luck

 

Risk~~

Thanks for the suggestion! Downloading now and will work on it this weekend when she brings the laptop back over!

Thank you for wishing me luck as well! WE will see!

Joanie

 

If Puppy does boot to the desktop, you will see the system's drives in the bottom left hand corner displayed as icons ie floppy, hdd partitions & optical(s).

If you do mount a drive ie hdd, remember to unmount it first before shutting down.

Good Luck