Re: Hard drive replacement

haligonab wrote:
Hi,

Apologies for my ignorance. I've been building my own desktops for 10
years, but I've been told that laptops are different beasts.

I just inherited a 5-year-old Toshiba A15-S127 from a friend. It
appears that the hard drive (original Toshiba) has given up the ghost.
When we booted it up, it ran a full scandisk (to my friend's surprise)
and corrected all errors and ran flawlessly for 3 hours. When we
rebooted it couldn't access the hard drive. He said his son had
dropped it more than once. I assume that the HD has been damaged, as
it displayed new errors when scandisk ran again. And again. Then I got
the "a disk read error has occurred" message over and over. Now all I
get is the Toshiba splash screen and a blinking cursor followed by a
blank screen. Hmm... now the "a disk read error has occurred" message
is back.

BTW, I tried booting from an XP install disk. I got it to boot once
but it crashed during the system scan. Now it won't boot at all.
That's got me wondering if the IDE connector on the board could be
damaged? I can hear both the HDD and combo drives spin up.

I'd rather not throw money at this if it seems to be a mobo problem,
but I wouldn't mind investing in a new hard drive. Any thoughts you
folks might offer would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Steve

Does it boot to BIOS? Does it display any problems while in BIOS?
Does BIOS detect the CD ROM everytime you boot?
Reseat memory. reseat the CD rom. If it took a fall the CDrom, while not exactly fragile, could be damaged.

This could help your project along:

http://www.irisvista.com/tech/laptops/ToshibaA15/SatelliteA15_laptop_disassembly_1.htm



.

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