New HD for Toshiba Satellite 5105-s501

[Dark.Grausherra]

My HD crashed the other day and I ordered a new one. It came in
today, and I placed it in the tray. Put in CD-1 of the Toshiba
recovery discs and chose to boot from CD. The first time I tried it
the Intel boot program loaded, asked me to insert the disc (which it
already was) then press any key when ready. Pressed a key, and it
said 'Starting Windows 95...' with a blinking underscore a few lines
down. Nothing happened for like 5 minutes. Turned off the computer,
tried it again. This time, got a blinking underscore for a while
before it said 'Starting Windows 95...' and appeared to stop working
again. Anyone know what might be the problem? Is it the fact that
the recovery discs are not boot CDs, or is it that the HD needs to be
formatted first?

 

[Mike Walsh]

It has been a while since I did a restore like that but I believe the drive must be partitioned but does not need to be formatted because the restore operation will format it before restoring the files.

 

[Dark.Grausherra]

Thank you for the reply. How do I partition the drive? Sorry for not
knowing what to do, this is my first time installing a new HD.

 

[Mike Walsh]

You will need a bootable CD. It can be either DOS, Linux, or a windows installation CD. With DOS you can use fdisk to see if there are any existing partitions and create a partiton if necessary. Linux will have similar options. A windows installation CD will be able to create a partition if none are present.

 

[Dark.Grausherra]

Not sure why, but I decided to try it again, this time it said
'Starting Windows 95' and low and behold, it did. Following that it
said 'Windows is Bypassing your startup files.' Then after the
Microsoft copyright it has A:\> with a blinking underscore. What do I
do now?

 

[Grinder]

Not sure why, but I decided to try it again, this time it said
'Starting Windows 95' and low and behold, it did. Following that it
said 'Windows is Bypassing your startup files.' Then after the
Microsoft copyright it has A:\> with a blinking underscore. What do I
do now?

Can you "see" your CD-ROM drive from that DOS prompt? If so, is there a
setup.exe on the disc? If so, run it.

 

[Dark.Grausherra]

Not sure how to do that. I'd be appretiative if someone could tell
me.

 

[Mike Walsh]

It didn't really start Win95. It started DOS7. Run Fdisk. If it recognizes the hard drive you can see if there are any partitions, or create a partition if there is none.
The boot image of the CD is drive A. Normally the hard drive would be drive C and the rest of the CD would be drive D, but this can vary depending on what drives are available. Run e.g. Dir /A/O/P C:\ to see what is on the drives (the switches are not needed, but will make it easier to tell what is there). If it is a Win95 installation CD you will be able to run Setup.exe; if it is a restore CD there might be a different file, e.g. Restore.exe.

 

[Dark.Grausherra]

If Fdisk is a DOS command it came up as a bad command. Ran Dir /a /o /
p c:\ and I got the response: 'Drive C has no label. Invalid drive
specification.

 

[Mike Walsh]

Fdisk might not be on the CD or it might be in a subdirectory. Run Dir /S/A A:\fdisk.exe to see if it is on the CD. You might have to enter the full path to run it e.g. A:\dos\fdisk.exe
Also try Dir on drive D. Part of the CD might be under a drive letter other than A.
There is no valid drive C; either the hard drive is not visible or it is not formatted. Is the hard drive visible in the BIOS?