I need help figuring out what’s wrong with Daughter Number Two’s computer. It’s a Toshiba Satellite laptop running Windows 7. When she went to bed the other night it was left turned on. When she got up the next morning it was off and, upon restarting it, she discovered that it will display the Toshiba logo for a second or five, like normal, then it goes to a black screen with a blinking cursor and there it stays.
At first I was thinking that it had overheated and fried the CPU, but then it dawned on me that without the CPU, it wouldn’t even be able to perform the Power On Self Test (POST), which is what it’s doing when the Toshiba logo is displayed.
My next thought was that the hard drive was not working, however, when I had her boot from my Kubuntu Linux LiveCD, it started up and the Linux’s file manager was able to browse the hard drive and I was able to look at the partition table. I’m not brave (or dumb, as the case may be) to mess with trying to modify a partition table, so looking at it was where I stopped.
What has me stumped is why it will boot from a CD but not the hard drive.
I would just put in a Windows setup disk, boot from that, and re-install Windows, but Toshiba, in their infinite wisdom, chose not to include an actual setup disk, but instead made a hidden recovery partition. The recovery program is accessed by holding the 0 (zero) key while turning on the power. This machine locks up before it notices that you’re pressing any keys. This also means that pressing F8 while booting Windows isn’t an option.
If anyone has a suggestion, I’d be more than willing to listen.
