PLEASE! help for booting for cd and reading dvd in my toshiba

Hi I have a Toshiba satellite A45 sp270 and I've had all kinds of problems *it's old and not very well kept* It was given to me used by my father. After removing tons of spyware and freeing space in the HDD I have two problems>

1) I cannot boot from the cd - I want to run hdd regenerator and do a chkdsk- I press f2 of f8 to select the option to boot from the cd. It starts reading the cd, the screen goes black for a few seconds and then it gives me the loading xp logo and goes right into windows.

2) Probably related to the other problem is that my cd drive doesn´t read anything with video only audio cd´s

BTW I lost my Toshiba recovery disc and I don´t know how easy it is to get it back as it was bought in Cancun, Mexico and I am not there.

Many thanks!

 

What disc is it having trouble reading? HDD Regenerator?

First, you noted this is an OLD laptop. This brings to mind several possibilities.

First, the cd player is broke. Of all the parts in a laptop, a cd-rom is the most common to break things because it hs the most moving parts.

Let's set that aside for a moment. Its old. Ever run a cd-cleaner through it? Don't underestimate the need for a cd-cleaner. your cd-rom reads your cd by bouncing a laser across the service and into a lens...a dirty lens can slow and even prevent it from working properly.

CD-cleaners will tell you to run them weekly or monthly, but that's over-doing it. But once in a while is a good thing.

Did you burn this cd (hdd regenerator) on this laptop using this cd-reader/writer? A laptop gets bumped around quite a bit and I have seen cd-roms be slightly out of alignment so that cds burned on other machines not work on one that has been bumped.

try burning the cd on the same machine if possible, or several different ones.

Maybe this is just a coaster?

 

It doesn´t play any cd that contains video, it does play music cd´s. I should note that when cleaning out spyware/adware there was one that mentioned video activex or something related to video.

I will try with the cleaner tonight, I just spent 6 months in Beijing and it is an incredibly dusty city.

I used my own computer to burn it, It also didnt work with an xp disc from which I tried to run the chkdsk. it also wont show me the BIOS or any of the advanced booting options. I will try also to run the hdd regenerator with an external cd drive tonight.

Any other ideas with this new info?

 

The video issue should not be related to this issue--that is more likely codec related.

When your pc boots, it does not have the ability to play videos either.

The fact it cannot boot with anything is interesting.

f8 loads the advanced window menu, so that is pointless (it does not kick in until after the kernal has loaded, but before realmode drivers are loaded

f2 is what-- a boot menu (to select a device)? Or to enter bios to set the boot order?

One more--any chance this thing has a hidden partition for restore on it? I just encountered a machine where the mbr was damaged and you could not boot from a windows disk (I still don't know why this is) no matter what--though a linux live cd booted just fine.

 

Actually I can play any video that is already in my hard drive, if I put in the tray a cd with video It won´t even recognize it. going into my PC it tells me the cd drive is empty

In my lappie f2 or f8 do the same that is It gives you the option to go to the BIOS to boot from a cd, from a floppy etc...

but It doesnt obey any of the commands twice I got into the BIOS but mostly it just goes into loading xp and ignores whatever you tell the computer to do.

Any more ideas (I really appreciate youur help) I will look into the partition thing

 

http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download

Download an ubuntu live cd iso and burn it (as an iso, do not copy it to a cd, this is an disk image)

It will run a live version of linux from the cd...it will not install linux on your laptop

I kust want to see if the cd will read the linux boot record

 

I will let you know how it goes. It does recognize blank cd's

Thanks

 

I am donwloading ubuntu now, I had problems with mi ISP and was using some weak wireless signal and ubuntu wouldn't download. Now I am up and running and I will let you know how it goes