Can't figure out what's going on with Toshiba laptop.

I got a bunch of computers from this guy a while back and I've just kind of been going through and seeing what's good and what's not. This particular laptop was fine other than a dead hard drive. Booted it up from an Ubuntu live CD and all the hardware seemed to work just fine (was able to connect to the internet through ethernet and wireless, USB ports were good, optical drive worked, touchpad and keyboard was fine, etc...). So I set it to the side for a while. Well, my brother broke the screen on his laptop and couldn't use his computer anymore. I asked him to let me see it, checked the hard drive and saw that it was a SATA drive and would fit in the little Toshiba L45-S7409 laptop I had.

So I threw it in and it booted up fine. Everything seemed to work alright, but it wouldn't connect to the internet at all either via ethernet or through the wireless adapter. Light wouldn't come on on the adapter, nothing. I turned it off, put in my Ubuntu CD, and booted it back up. Ethernet light came on, I booted into Ubuntu and everything worked fine again. I figured I was just having a driver issue, so I hunted down the driver for the wireless adapter, installed it, rebooted and it still doesn't work. Now it's telling me that my copy of Windows isn't genuine, and I can't get on the internet even with the Ubuntu CD (light still comes on for the adapter though).

The hard drive in question has 64 bit Windows Vista Home Edition on it. Admittedly, this laptop is not really set up hardware wise for a 64 bit OS, but everything is running fine from a software standpoint. Could it just be that there aren't any compatible drivers for a 64 bit OS available for this particular model? Everything else hardware related seems to be working great. Like I said, the only thing that seems to be having any issues is my internet connectivity.

That's another thing too, glad I typed myself into that. The indicator in the system tray says I'm connected to the internet. I can ping an IP address (I tried several. Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc...) and get a response without dropping any packets or timing out. But if I try to open a browser, run software updates, anything it doesn't work.

Not really sure what's going on here.

 

Based on your info; I'm assuming you did not reformat the drive and reload Windows after moving the hard drive to the new PC.

When initially installed, Windows "tweaks" itself (registry, license code, drivers, etc.) to match the hardware configuration. If the drive (with the initial Windows install) is moved to a different PC, merely updating the drivers isn't enough. The copy of Windows will still be unstable and prone to crashing.

In addition (as you noted), if 64-bit drivers are not available for the PC, this will add to instability and hardware issues.

In order to solve the problem you'll need to do a fresh Windows install. Using the PC mfr's website, be sure drivers are available for the version you're installing.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news; however I hope this helps.

 

I had a feeling that was probably the case, but just wanted to be sure. Upon further investigation he's got a couple of options here I think, I'll go ahead and backup the contents of the drive and see what he wants to do. Thanks for the help.