Help - Driver/bios and general nightmare trying to get laptop running again

So here is the story. About a year ago I purchased a Toshiba L305D laptop. Within a few months the hard drive failed. I actually TRIED to get some warranty help through Toshiba but they were absolutely unhelpful so I gave up, got mad and bought another laptop.

Now money is tight and I have some time and I decided I wanted to try to get this laptop running again and it has been a nightmare. To start I grabbed a new hard drive and my trusty copy of Vista Ultimate and tried to install.

To my dismay the install went 99 percent and then hung up at completing with no perceived actual actions being performed. I started it over and it then began an install loop that told me windows failed to install properly and I needed to install again but then it wouldnt boot from the disk so i had to wipe the hard drive clean and start over. Well I tried three more times with the same result.

So I did some digging with some people recommending switching some bios settings around to different hard drive controller settings or something to that effect, but the computer will not let me get into the bios for some unknown reason so that is not an option.

I have another laptop that uses two hard drives so I came to the conclusion that maybe i could just do an image of that hard drive to the second hard drive, pop it in and let Vista do a recovery or something but while that ALMOST worked, it would get to almost load, then kick out to reboot and give me options to boot differently. No way to boot is successful. Vista no longer boots from the drive either so I cant do a recovery or anything...which is also odd because my good laptop doesnt seem to recognize my CD drive right now and i think it is software related so perhaps my hard drive image is causing that problem to cross over to the other laptop?

Anyways...i give up...i need help...any suggestions? questions? did i post this in the right place?

TIA for anyone who wants to jump in and throw some ideas at me!

 

First check all your fans are spinning underneath to rule out overheating,I'm not sure why bios changes have been recommended?It's a laptop there are very few things your change in the bios if anything at all even if you could access it but it is strange you can't access it,can you provide more info on what exactly happens when you hit F2 or DEL,do you get a written no go or does it lock up?

I would guess straight away at a bad or dying hard drive,in my experience this has always been the cause of windows not installing correctly but you say you've changed the hardrive?Get the old dead HD and put it in your working laptop,try to install windows from disk to rule it out,you can also connect the dead HD to desktop as a secondary or secondary in your laptop if you can fit two drives in there then download diagnostic tools from the HD manufacturers website and run the test's,next to the same with the good HD your trying to install to make sure its working properly,you need to be POSITIVE the old one is bad and the new one is good.

Remove one stick of memory if it has two and use just one and try to install windows,if it fails again swap the sticks over and try again.

Failure to access bios can also be caused dying bios battery,these can be tricky to replace so leave it till last,you may have to remove the bottom of the laptop to replace it,if your lucky it will be under the modem panel which makes it easy to test a different battery,also while your running diagnostics remove the modem and wireless card if they are easily accessed.

Few things to try I hope that keeps you busy for short while:cool