Tryna fix my friends laptop

thedon23 · Oct 25, 2011

Hey guys,

I'm not great with this stuff, so just wanted to make sure what I'm doing seems fine.

The laptop is a Toshiba (not really relevant I guess). Anyways, so when I turn it on, it shows the Toshiba screen, then goes to a black screen with a white cursor just flashing in the top left. Tried F8 to get to safe mode, doesn't work. Only screen I can get to is the Boot Manager (F12).

He can't find his Windows CD, so I'm just going to download Windows 7, burn a bootable CD, and put it into the CD drive.

Once I get to the Boot Manager, this is the screen:

Any idea what to do from there?

Thanks guys.

PS. I know this isn't a tech support forum LOL but you guys are helpful and quick to help.

Gammbyt · Oct 25, 2011

You will want to boot from the DVD-RAM selection once you put the Windows cd in if it doesn't automatically boot from it for you. Was it working before and then quit booting or was the hard drive just replaced?

thedon23 · Oct 25, 2011

Gammbyt said:
You will want to boot from the DVD-RAM selection once you put the Windows cd in if it doesn't automatically boot from it for you. Was it working before and then quit booting or was the hard drive just replaced?

It was working before; just happened today. No idea why. Haven't replaced the hard drive; still the same hard drive that came with the laptop originally.

gdolla · Oct 25, 2011

select hdd recovery it will recover the os on the computer

SahL · Oct 25, 2011

Enter the DVD maybe the Boot from DVD option will appear.

Havent used the toshiba Device ever so cannot tell exactly what todo,

Can you goto the standard BIOS?

Gammbyt · Oct 25, 2011

From what I have seen, that usually only happens for one of 2 reasons. Either the HD is bad (or going bad) or maybe a virus has caused it. I have only seen this caused by viruses once or twice - usually it ends up being a bad HD.

If you reload it you could lose any data that was on there. Windows 7 will usually dump all of your old data into C:/Windows.old folder but I have seen a few cases where the data was corrupt.

You can try to connect the HD to another computer to see if you can recover any data or back it up just in case if you have anything you want to save.

If you do find out that it is a bad HD you might still be able to recover some of the data - though there's no guarantee how much you can recover. I can walk you through the steps to do that if you need to try.

thedon23 · Oct 25, 2011

SahL said:
Enter the DVD maybe the Boot from DVD option will appear.

Havent used the toshiba Device ever so cannot tell exactly what todo,

Can you goto the standard BIOS?

Thanks Sahl. About to burn Windows 7 onto a CD and we'll see how that works. Can't get into standard BIOS.

Gammbyt said:
From what I have seen, that usually only happens for one of 2 reasons. Either the HD is bad (or going bad) or maybe a virus has caused it. I have only seen this caused by viruses once or twice - usually it ends up being a bad HD.

If you reload it you could lose any data that was on there. Windows 7 will usually dump all of your old data into C:/Windows.old folder but I have seen a few cases where the data was corrupt.

You can try to connect the HD to another computer to see if you can recover any data or back it up just in case if you have anything you want to save.

If you do find out that it is a bad HD you might still be able to recover some of the data - though there's no guarantee how much you can recover. I can walk you through the steps to do that if you need to try.

Hopefully it's just a virus. There isn't too much important data on there, so no worries there. If I find out that it's a bad HD, I just might take you up on that offer

Thanks man, appreciate it!

Dazzler said:
yeah put in the CD then go back to the boot menu, then select the DVD ram one. If it won't load windows to start re-installation then there's probably something wrong internally that needs to be replaced. In that case it'll probably be the hard drive.

Thanks bro, I'm going to do that shortly. I'll let you guys know how it goes.

Tryna fix my friends laptop

thedon23

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