OK, how bad is it?

My son's Toshiba A15-129s has been giving him some problems, so I inherited it. He said that he was having problems keeping it booted up. When I got it, it seemed to be very stable. I began downloading years of Windows XP updates and finally got it up to service pack 2. All with no problems. Dumped a lot of his trash out of it and played with it for about a week straight with no problem. Then I got the bright idea to upgrade it to XP professional and it has been down hard ever since. It survived a few of the shutdown and startups that you have to go through, then went into a loop looking for files and finally crashed.

Now when you power up, you get the Toshiba screen, hear the hd wind up for a few seconds and nothing but a black screen with a cursor in the corner blinking.

I have tried booting up with the restore disk and also the xp install disk with no luck.

Ideas?

 

Does the XP disc even attempt to spin up? You do have the CD/DVD drive set as the first bootable device in the BIOS I presume?

The blinking cursor in the corner sometimes comes up before the Windows loading screen, but it isn't normal for it to stay more than 45 seconds or so.

I'd work on getting the XP disc to boot so you can try wiping the drive and installing again fresh. If the CD drive is the first bootable device, but still isn't spinning up, you might try removing and reseating it. Also check your XP disc to make sure it's free of dust and scratches. I'd do the long NTFS format on the drive to make sure there won't a single bad sector that's going to mess you up later.

 

I am going to assume that pulling the cd drive and reinstalling had some effect, although I did pull the battery for a while. It's up and running, for the time being, now to get it to find the net.

Thanks to you, and the "How to rip your Toshiba to shreds" thread.

 

Sounds like you had a bad install or the hard drive has failed. It would behove you to download the Ultimate Boot CD (it is free) and run a hard drive scan on it.

Also, the A15 has an issue with overheating. Please blow out the fan and heatsink with some compressed air. You can purchase at your local office supply store for a few dollars.