Total newbie, needing some help

Hello everyone. New guy here with a question. I have a Toshiba a45-s120 that has worked great for me for a while now, but I recently have ran into a serious problem. All of a sudden, my laptop won't boot up. It tries to boot up(gets to the WinXP loading screen), then flashes a screen the resembles the "blue screen of death", but isn't. The screen flashes so quickly I can't see what's actually on it. Then it goes to where I can choose to boot normally, in safe mode, safe mode with networking, etc. If I try to reboot normally, same thing happens. If I try to boot in safe mode, it stops at 'mup.sys', stays there for like 15 seconds, then flashes that same blue screen super quickly, then back to the booting options.
I have no idea what happened, but I can deal with having to reformat or reinstall windows. My HUGE problem is that the cd-rom on the laptop doesn't work(never did...got the laptop used). So my question is, if I went and bought an external cd-rom, would my laptop boot from the external cd-rom? I would imagine the external drive would be connected via USB, and I'm not sure if I can force the computer to boot from a usb device. Would an external hard drive be any different?? Any suggestions are quite welcome.

Or am I just totally screwed here??

Thanks to all the take the time to read and help.
rock

 

There seems to be some sort of Instructions here:

http://www.computing.net/windowsxp/wwwboard/forum/97354.html

I had a similar problem, get a philips head screwdriver, and make sure all the screws on the bottom of the laptop are fixed up tightly.

As far as I am aware, only some laptops can boot from a USB device, so youll need to check if that is avaliable...and how to access yuor boot menu before booting into Windows.

 

Thanks for the reply. I made sure all the screws were tight. No difference. I also checked out that link you gave me, but nothing there helped either. I don't have another HD to swap out, nor would I know where to look for memory slots or how to tell if one damaged. I also can't run chkdsk since I can't actually get into windows.
I can get into my boot menu, but it doesn't look like there's a way to make it boot from a usb device. The only choices are HDD, FDD, CD-Rom, and LAN. I'm getting a bad feeling here, like I just might be screwed.

 

Here's a good resource: http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=1647&page=4

It sounds like you've covered some of the basics and apparently can't see the error messages, so check out the other chapters (links near the bottom of the page). PCstats has an annoying splash screen, but the info is good.

 

if you have an XP cd you can boot to it, enter into the recovery console by pressing 'r' at the first screen, and then running chkdsk /f

 

The xp cd is not a problem. The problem is that my cd-rom doesn't work, and the system won't boot up. I was gonna try to hook up an external cd-rom, but apparently I can't force my laptop to boot up from a USB drive. This totally sucks.
Thanks though.

 

Have a floppy drive on your lappy? you can make the xp cd out of floppies -

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q310994

 

I wish. I have the internal HD, a non working cd-rom, 4 usb slots, and the slot for my wireless card. Plus the hookup for a monitor an printer. Don't think any of that is gonna be of any help.

 

My best suggestion to you is to either
A. replace your cd-rom drive and attempt to use the xp cd to boot and run chkdsk /f
B. use a Laptop to IDE adapter like this - http://www.cablestogo.com/product.a...ds!654&keyword=(laptop+ide+hard+drive+adapter)
to hook to the laptop drive and connect it to a desktop computer to backup your data and test hd / defrag / disk maintenance
C. take to a local computer shop.

 

I'm thinking "C" is gonna end up happening. I was hoping it was something that even with my very limited knowledge, I would be able to fix. Thanks very much for your input.