Hi guys i'm having a problem when I turn on my laptop, its a toshiba equium A210. It starts to boot and hangs when it reaches the toshiba logo and the status bar indicates its 3/4 of the way through the boot. The f2 and f12 keys dont work and nothing else happens. I have reset the bios by bridging the two pins on the mother board and this works until the next turn on. The reset only works with the dvd drive removed ! It seems to me that something is altering the boot menu but I cant find what is doing it any ideas ?

my lap top used to do that, mine is an avent with windows vista, ihad to keep messing about with it, what the problem was when my girlfriend used to turn it off she didnt wait for it to fully shut down and she would pull the screen closed and let the battery run out, i just give it a full desrtuctive recovery and its been good ever since but you have save all the stuff u dont want deleted!

That seem like my only option thanks

My nephew's Acer was doing the same, he left it for 6 hours to see if it would finish booting but it never did. We had to do a full recovery on it as well. Does it have a recovery partition that you can access, alt+f10 on boot up ?

My IBM thinkpad played up, I had the change the lythium battery to preserve the boot settings.

Try F8 on Boot, and then get into a command promtp menu and do a

chkdsk

This will check the hard drive ofr errors. It needs to be done at DOS / command prompt level.

If you cant get that far, insert the windows disk/CD, and DONT install windows.
However, you can get into a recovery mode, and from there you get a command prompt.
The you can run chkdsk.

Once you are at the command prompt, I would go to the top level directory by typing

C:


then...

chkdsk /?

This will give you all the command switches.
I would think you need

chkdsk /F

Once that has run it should sort the disk out if there are any errors on the disk. This may take some time depending on how big the disk is.
So be patient.
If it take more than an hour it could be stuffed. Kepe an eye on the hard drive activity light, if it keeps flashing then its accessing and doing things. expect short periods of inactivity, but not long!

Hope this helps.


You can always make a bootable disk from www.bootdisk.com if you have another PC and a floppy disk or CD writer.

A bootable CD that goes into Dos, and with a load of software tools on it is always a good tool to have in the cupboard.

Have tried many things and have found that if I boot with the dvd drive removed the laptop works fine. If I reinstall the drive it is not recognised and neither is another known good dvd drive.
have run chkdsk no errors found


[Edited on 8/8/10 by Bigheppy]