Satellite refusing to boot

Anyone experienced anything like this / has a solution?

I have a s1400-103 which has been very reliable even though its had a rough life in a school for two years. This week it refuses to boot properly. It starts up, does its POST and when part way into starting XP Pro it stops and reboots or shuts down.

If safe mode booted to command prompt it stops at ALIM1541.sys then shuts down.

I did a full recovery from CD but although it did not complain, when booting XP I get a message "the system is not fully installed. please run setup again". I tried recovery again but got the same thing.

If formatted with DOS 6.22 it works fine so the HD seems OK, I suspect somethig deeper in the hardware which XP interacts with has gone wobbly.

 

- I forgot to ask
anybody know of a good dos utility / download which can report on test / report motherboard errors?

 

The only possible DOS utilities that will test your motherboard, would probably be the utilities provided by Toshiba. In most cases, you would not have access to them, they're only available to ASP's.

I checked the file that you're having the problem with, and it looks like it's an NT AGP Filter. Not shure what it does though. There was a post of a user with a similar problem on his desktop. This error occured after upgrading his motherboard. So it seems to be some sort of protection on the XP OS when activated. If this unit did not come with XP, then that would explain it. If it did, then the original recovery CD's should work fine. You indicated that they didn't work, so in this event, it's possible the OS is not recognizing the system properly. It's a good bet there's probably something wrong with the hardware. You're gonna have to contact Toshiba if it's a hardware problem or Microsoft if it's related to the OS.

-Vb-

 

See if someone you know has an XP pro install disk and try booting to the XP CD and try to install it. When you do; specify that you want an NTFS partition and for it to do the full format(not quick format)and see if it will format the drive and install the OS. Don't keep XP on the notebook as activating with microsoft will disable your friends OS on his computer the next time his OS calls home to microsoft. If the format goes well you will know it's not the hard drive. Formatting in DOS does not prove anything about the hard drive except that it's not crashed. This is because DOS is very forgiving and only formats using DOS drivers that don't have the high speed capability that XP formats with when installing the OS or uses when running the OS. DOS will use the most basic of drivers at the speeds that were used back when DOS was in fashion(it's been so long I don't even remember the name but it was even before PIO mode 1).

If it fails the XP format, then see if there is another drive to try. Failing the format in XP could mean not only the drive has a problem but it could be the controller in the notebook instead. If XP works after the install then your system got trashed and your recovery CD is bad as well. If the format and install complete but XP won't run then the notebook needs to go in for repair. Before sending it in ask how much it will cost for an estimate and decide if it is worth fixing. If it is 2 years old and they want more than $200 or so to fix it you may want to trash it and buy a new one or go on Ebay and pick one up for the cost of the repair. Another option is if the estimate is free, get one and see what the problem is and how much they want for the repair; if it's more than you want to spend haave them ship it back to you and see if the parts are available on Ebay as well.

Hope my long winded remote troubleshooting advice helps[ ]

Jack

"They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security" (Ben Franklin)
http://pbase.com/joneill