Toshiba Satellite M115-S3094 wont boot

[~bogus name]

Hi,
the system hangs just after the windows splash screen when booting normally.
the system hangs after a few drivers install when booting to safe mode.
the system hangs when ubunto live trys to load, the mem check on the live cd
works fine.
the system hangs when booting fm CD to reload windows when it gets to the
point where in starts copying files.

I pulled the drive and put it in as a slave in my PC via USB2 and the drive
is fine, i can read and write to it.

The toshiba sees the drive in it's bios.
All bios functions are working normally.

I'm out of ideas.
Any help appreciated.

Alan

ps: the controller on the mobo has to OK for the bios to see the drive,
right?
also, the same thing happens with the batter in or out, and with the AC
adaptor on or off.

 

[Paul]

Hi,
the system hangs just after the windows splash screen when booting normally.
the system hangs after a few drivers install when booting to safe mode.
the system hangs when ubunto live trys to load, the mem check on the live cd
works fine.
the system hangs when booting fm CD to reload windows when it gets to the
point where in starts copying files.

I pulled the drive and put it in as a slave in my PC via USB2 and the drive
is fine, i can read and write to it.

The toshiba sees the drive in it's bios.
All bios functions are working normally.

I'm out of ideas.
Any help appreciated.

Alan

ps: the controller on the mobo has to OK for the bios to see the drive,
right?
also, the same thing happens with the batter in or out, and with the AC
adaptor on or off.

The Ubuntu test kinda tells you there is a hardware problem.
Since your hard drive tests good, it would suggest the problem
is somewhere other than the storage devices themselves.

Maybe you could prep a Linux Live boot from a USB stick ?
I bet that would hang too.

Maybe the laptop is overheating ? Are the vents clean ?

You'd think the memtest would have heated it up a little
bit.

Then it could be something else overheating. Have you
ever had the laptop apart, for some home-brew maintenance ?

Paul

 

[~bogus name]

hi paul, thanks for the reply,
no never had it apart.
it's not over heating.
since the post i set the bios to boot fm usb
and set up the hard drive in an external
adapter, and tried to boot it from the usb port,
but it didn't work. Got a message saying
there is no operating system on the usb device.
I will investigate loading an os on a usb key
and see if that leads anywhere.
I'm leaning towards a mother board problem/failure
because the optical, hard drive, and memory
all check out ok.
alan

 

[Dave]

hi paul, thanks for the reply,
no never had it apart.
it's not over heating.
since the post i set the bios to boot fm usb
and set up the hard drive in an external
adapter, and tried to boot it from the usb port,
but it didn't work. Got a message saying
there is no operating system on the usb device.
I will investigate loading an os on a usb key
and see if that leads anywhere.
I'm leaning towards a mother board problem/failure
because the optical, hard drive, and memory
all check out ok.
alan

Nope, your power supply is weak. That's the bad news. The good news is,
it's the easiest part to replace, no tools needed. -Dave

 

[~bogus name]

hey dave, thanks for the idea. I checked the voltage and its 16v, the brick
says 15v and 4.47amps. Under load maybe the voltage is braking down. I
don't have a power supply with the same plug that the tashiba uses so I
can't check it with a known good one. I'll see if i can find a neighbor
with a toshiba and borrow one.
Alan

 

[~bogus name]

I bought a new power supply. It arrived yesterday.
Same symtoms. Won't write to the hard drive.
No luck on os on usb key. IE, couldn't get one
to work.

 

[Paul]

I bought a new power supply. It arrived yesterday.
Same symtoms. Won't write to the hard drive.
No luck on os on usb key. IE, couldn't get one
to work.

If the USB key is "small enough", you could use the
HP Drivekey program.

"To make an HP Flash Disk bootable, install the "HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool",
HPUSBFormatter.exe. After the Format Tool has been installed execute the application;
by default it is located in c:\DriveKey\HPUSBFW.EXE. Choose to "Create a DOS startup
disk" and select the FREEDOS folder from this Softpaq as the location in the field
"using DOS system files located at"."

I tried that with an 8GB stick, and it failed. I tried
it with a 1GB stick and it worked. The software wasn't
clever enough to just ignore the excess space.

I also had success with a second technique. I happened to
have a 1.44MB MSDOS floppy, used for general purpose hacking.
On a lark, I happened to be in Linux, and used "dd" to
copy the 1.44MB of sectors, from the floppy drive, to
my USB stick. When I rebooted the computer, and selected
the USB stick to boot from, the damn thing worked.
In that case, MSDOS thinks the device is 1.44MB in
size, so it cannot see the remaining space.

You can probably find articles, on putting Linux on a
USB stick. My problem is, I find very few distros will
boot without problems on my machine. Knoppix is very good,
and I've coaxed some version of Knoppix to boot in
a variety of situations (even in Virtual PC). I tried DSL,
but it couldn't handle my Southbridge storage interface
properly. I've had a few other distros, roll over and
blow up (kernel fault). So while there may be
recipes available, they may not work for you.
The only good thing I can say about using the USB
Flash stick for the experiment, is it isn't costing
you anything. I got tired of throwing away CDs
from all these distro experiments. Very few were
"keepers".

http://www.linux.com/distrocentral/distronews/8221-comparing-linux-usb-flash-disk-distros

Another example recipe here.

http://www.pendrivelinux.com/usb-x-ubuntu-610/

I suspect Knoppix 6.0.1 has a built-in menu item, so
that when you boot with the Knoppix 6.0.1 CD, you
can create a USB flash boot image directly. I'll
reboot and see if I can get that to work.

Paul

 

[Paul]

I suspect Knoppix 6.0.1 has a built-in menu item, so
that when you boot with the Knoppix 6.0.1 CD, you
can create a USB flash boot image directly. I'll
reboot and see if I can get that to work.

Paul

Pretty funny. I tried it. The Knoppix script prepared my USB
flash drive. But the BIOS couldn't see it was bootable - my
BIOS just ignored it and I ended up booting into Windows again.

Paul

 

[Paul]

Pretty funny. I tried it. The Knoppix script prepared my USB
flash drive. But the BIOS couldn't see it was bootable - my
BIOS just ignored it and I ended up booting into Windows again.

Paul

OK, fixed it. I found a Debian web page,
which mentioned installing a Linux MBR.
Apparently, even the "cat" command could be
used, but I like "dd". No count or bs parameters
are needed, as it just copies until the source
file is exhausted.

sudo dd if=/usr/lib/syslinux/mbr.bin of=/dev/sda

The mbr.bin is a short file, perhaps 404 bytes, and will
occupy the first sector of the USB flash stick.

My USB flash stick apparently had a Windows MBR in there,
and Linux didn't remove it. It also implies, when the
time comes to do something Windows related on that
flash stick, I'll be zapping the MBR yet again.

I didn't have to change the rest of the stick. I just
used the menu item in Knoppix, to install to a flash drive,
and the rest of the procedure went OK (if a little bit slow).
It has to copy 660MB to the flash drive, and that can
take a while. Before the script would copy Knoppix onto
the stick, the stick had to be formatted FAT32.

So that gives me a Linux boot option, without an optical drive.

To get there, you still need to burn a CD, so you can use
the script inside Knoppix. So another fully functional
computer is needed, to do the prep work.

Paul

 

[~bogus name]

Paul,
thanks for the details on usb flash stick.
I'm otherwise occupied for the next two weeks
so i won't be able to work on it until then.
Meanwhile, on the laptop, via a usb floppy drive
I ran a win98startup disk. It said there was no
c drive. I think the motherboard is the culpret at this point.
I also flashed the bios with latest version. Also via the
usb floppy drive.
All of the hardware checks out. I cleaned all of
the contacts on the mobo and the hard drive twice.
The thing that has me baffeled is that the bios sees
the hard drive, nothing can read it, or write to it.
Linux live can't, win98 boot disk can't, 3 different
xp installs disks can't. The operating systems all
think that there is no hard drive in the laptop.
Al

ps: i can read and write to the drive from
a usb adapter in my desktop pc. That's how
I burned the "my docs" folder for the owner who
is just happy to have the data at this point.

 

[Paul]

Paul,
thanks for the details on usb flash stick.
I'm otherwise occupied for the next two weeks
so i won't be able to work on it until then.
Meanwhile, on the laptop, via a usb floppy drive
I ran a win98startup disk. It said there was no
c drive. I think the motherboard is the culpret at this point.
I also flashed the bios with latest version. Also via the
usb floppy drive.
All of the hardware checks out. I cleaned all of
the contacts on the mobo and the hard drive twice.
The thing that has me baffeled is that the bios sees
the hard drive, nothing can read it, or write to it.
Linux live can't, win98 boot disk can't, 3 different
xp installs disks can't. The operating systems all
think that there is no hard drive in the laptop.
Al

ps: i can read and write to the drive from
a usb adapter in my desktop pc. That's how
I burned the "my docs" folder for the owner who
is just happy to have the data at this point.

I was going to suggest clearing the CMOS, but I
don't know how you do that on a laptop

I understand some flasher programs, have command
line options to do the equivalent of clearing the
CMOS. Some of the more modern versions of flashers,
have removed just about all of the command line
options. So you won't necessarily see that as an
option now. But some of the older flashers had
all sorts of options during the BIOS update.

Is there a "load setup defaults" in the Toshiba BIOS ?
Maybe you could try that, and see if the drive works
different on the next POST.

You really need some kind of diagnostic, but if you
did go looking for such a thing, you'd still have the
problem of how to boot the diagnostic. I have a
Seagate Seatools floppy here, which I use occasionally
as most of my current drives are Seagate. Years ago,
I had a collection of Maxtor, but I wouldn't buy one
now. I generally changed brands, every time one of them
croaks.

Paul