The story so far is that the hard drive buggered up on my Toshiba Satellite laptop. Windows would not start, and I cannot get in to change the bios (which is a pain in the A$$)so I cannot change the boot sequence to boot from CD. The recovery CD is now useless (as I formated the drive), but it wasn't any use anyway as the Laptop will not go to the CD after the HDD anyway. I have an external enclosure that i canput the HDD into, but wha i need to know is how to get a Windows installation on to it so that the laptop will boot up for me. Alternatively, is there anything that can be loaded on tthe HDD to get the laptop to look at the CD straight away so that i can do a clean install?? Any and all suggestions will be appreciated as this has me stumped.
What do you mean you "Can't get into BIOS".....Your HDD has nothing to do with BIOS,The BIOS is on your motherboard..... To get into BIOS the key is usually DEL or F2
tocool, i know my HDD has nothing to do with the bios, I cannot get into the bios to change the boot sequence on the laptop (I don;t get the option on the screen to press a key to go into the setup). I have also tried taking the HDD out to try and bypass that part of the boot sequence, however when i plug the HDD back in it doesn't get recognised. I want to do a clean install but with not being able to change the boot sequence I am having porblems doing this. I have also tried the "Hotkeys" that were in the handbook of the laptop but they do not work either (and didn't even before i formatted the HDD).
on some older computers the bios was not acessible, as was the case on my preevious sony Vaio. you best option is to press del repeatadely when you turn on power as this as worked for many people
put you harddisc into an enclosure and clone win98 onto it using norton ghost 2003 put it back into your laptop and it will boot up then restart in dos and start setup from your xp disc most laptops use f2 to get to setup so first try turning the laptop on and keeping the f2 button pressed also check the keyboard is connected you ought to be able to plug an ordinary keyboard in to your laptop so thats another thing to try
Thanx for all your suggestions, but it appears that the motherboard has had it. I gave it to a more techie erson than i and he discovered that this would be the problem. In teh end the laptop would not see the HDD at all. It is now lying behind a settee until i get someone to look at the MOBO for me to see if it can be resurrected (London Laptops have been mentioned to me). Time to build a pc methinks to replace it (and keep the daughter from dropping it).
