Hello. I have a Toshiba Satellte A 105 (Model NO PSAA8U-0VE034) My friend brought it to me and it wouldnt start up windows. First it was a missing NTLDR file which I tried to fix by loading my copy of XP to start recovery console. After loading the XP bootup disk, it gave an error with a corrupt file or something in D:/something/something/C: or something odd. After that, I tried the Toshiba recovery CD. (it gave the same error as the xp cd verbatim and said press any key to ignore or continue, so i did.) It loaded into memory successfully but there were no options to recorver single files. Only to install the whole software package, restore fully the laptop or erase the disk. I chose to erase the disk to sart from scratch. It took about 8 hours so I left it on over night to format.

When I checked in the morning, it was on a blue screen of death, asking if I had installed any new hardware or drivers. But, There should be no drivers or windows on the HHD. Kinda confused but, Im pretty sure there's a problem with the hard drive or something.

Is there anything I can do to narrow down the soure of the problem without rendering the warrant void? (I dont know if there is a warranty or not but I dont want to open up their laptop just incase.

Thanks for any help guys. James

hi james

i would try just running a complete restore as this process would format the drive and install the system back to factory settings,

finding a corrupt file in d: ..... would indicate there is either a problem in reading the disc as it happend on both discs ,have you another cd/dvd drive you could try ,so as to eliminate the possibility the cd drive isnt reading correctly

Unfortunately, I dont have any laptop hardware and dont wanna open it. Also, the recovery disk doesnt boot. It goes to a "Blue screen of death" after it loads to ram. ---
*** STOP: 0x000000c5 (0x859B0AFC, 0x00000002, 0x00000001, 0x8089592F)

ok
by any chance does it have a hidden recovery partition ?

do you have an option on boot to press f11 or similar ?

Not to my knowledge.

There is F2 (CMOS/BIOS) and F12 to select the bootup order. (CD/HDD/LAN/USB...)

Why did you choose to erase the disk Citizen?

There appeared to be no other options, when you check any of the boxes and click next, it says it will delete partitions so I just chose the most complete erase I saw. It included words like "ALL Partitions" instead of just "Data will be lost". Know what I mean? Do you think it's possible to know what the problem is? Should I try a different boot disk like my Ubuntu cd or something?