Re: Toshiba 3110CT won't boot


"Carolyn" <Carolyn.36ydo3@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:Carolyn.36ydo3@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

An interesting idea Tim, I may well give that a go -- did you have to
hold down a key at boot time to get the live CD to boot?

There's usually a way (hold down ESC or one of the function keys as you
power-up) to get into the BIOS on power-up so you can change the boot order
from Floppy -> Hard Drive -> CDROM to Floppy -> CDROM -> Hard Drive. That
way the machine will go to the Linux LiveCD before it ever tries the hard
drive. In fact, that's the only way to boot a LiveCD from a CDROM drive.


The weird thing is that the Laptop will boot to DOS quite happily.
Using a Win98 disk I have run scandisk and it found no errors -- which
seems to imply the hard disk is okay -- maybe. I have run tsetup and the
'end' key seems to do nothing (it is marked as reloading defaults on the
screen). Is there any way to force the BIOS back to factory settings?

Carolyn, Manchester, UK

The BIOS should allow you to set defaults once you get to it. The only thing
I've ever really changed in the BIOS on the machines I've owned has been the
boot device order.

Another thought. If you're booting DOS from a floppy OK then maybe the
problem is that the boot sector (1st sector on the hard drive) has been
corrupted. A successful boot from a floppy (or CDROM) would allow you to
look at the *files* on the hard drive but wouldn't necessarily tell you
about the health of the 1st sector of the hard drive. But DOS (and Linux,
too) have commands to rewrite that boot sector on the hard drive to get you
back in business. Something like 'fdisk /mbr' under DOS. When you initially
wrote that restoring your machine with the recovery CD seemed to go OK (took
30-45 minutes as I remember on my older Toshibas) but failed to boot once
that was done I had the feeling maybe your hard drive had a physically bad
sector #0. Booting with Linux would give you the ability to read sector #0
directly (use device /dev/hda with a 'cp' or 'dd' command) to check if it's
readable w/o error.

Tim


.

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