Toshiba A60/A65 Laptop Won't Boot Past Bios?

A while back I had a Toshiba laptop and one day while I was on it, it got a blue screen and died. Then wouldn't ever boot back up. Later I took it to Bestbuy where I got it, and they said the entire motherboard has fried as a result of extreame overheating, and that the only way to fix it would be to replace the motherboard. Well as a recent project I decided I would take it to a computer place and see what they thought. After doing a free diagnostic on it, they called and told me that nothing was physically wrong with the laptop itself, but that it had some viruses and it needed to be formated and have windows reinstalled. Before I had even called them, I messed with it myself, and the first time I turned it on in a year, it booted right up with everything the way I left it (this was a year after Bestbuy looked at it). Then I decided to do a recovery and see what happened. Right in the middle of the formatting, I got the blue screen and it crashed. I later tried formatting it with a Segate formatting tool that I found on the Bestbuy geeksquad disk they left in my computer. After around 8 hours it finished, and I tried to install windows. After trying it several times, I decided it wouldn't work because I had gotten the blue screen every time. I then tried running a full system test with the Bestbuy disk, and it failed every test it gave, CPU, Memory, ect. But now the computer place I took it to calls me, and says that it just has some viruses and needs to be formatted and have the OS reinstalled. They want to charge me $70 to do it. I can easily do that, the only reason I took it to them is because I thought it was hardware failure. But as I said, when I tried it, it didn't work. So I'm out of ideas. Let me know if anyone has a suggestion.

Thanks

 

I have already formatted the drive, but there is no OS on it. I can start to load the XP disk, but after it says loading setup files on the blue loading sceen, I get an error message and the computer shuts down.

Thanks

 

If the motherboard fried from overheating it would not turn on and stay on at all. But it may still be overheating that's causing the problem. Toshiba's are known for it.

Turn it on and boot into the bios. Check for an error log in there, some toshiba bios's have an error log and if it overheated and shut down it may be there. Leave it in the bios and put your hand over the intake vent for air. See if the fans spin up and if it shuts down. The fans should spin up as it gets warm but it should take a while to shut down. If it happens quickly the fan is bad or the vent is plugged. Alot of toshiba's have a copper heat sink that leads from the cpu to the fan and vent. They plug up easily with dust and pet hair. You can also do this with the hard drive out to help eliminate the drive as the issue.

It may also be the hard drive though and if so just re-installing windows won't help. How did they find viruses anyway if there was no OS??? Pop the cover off the drive and see what the model is and then go to their web site. Most have a bootable utility that will test the drive without needing to go into windows.

 

Thanks for the suggestions, however I can't do anything right now because when I went to pick my computer up and they told me I just needed to install XP again, I went and got my XP disk and showed them that I got an error message when trying to install it. Then we tried their copy just in case it was my disk. We got the same error message. They said they had ran a diagnostic on all of my hardware and it was all fine (including the HDD). They thought it might have been a bad DVD drive since it wouldn't install from any disk, and the HDD appeared to be fine.

 

I really don't know what the error message is because comes and goes so fast I don't have time to read it.

 

At what point do you get the error? Is it while its trying to go through the BIOS? Is it once it boots from the CD and is loading Windows setup? Or is during the actual installation at some point?

 

It's when it's loading the setup.

 

If you can get access to an external CDRom I'd go that route. That will tell you pretty quickly if the CD drive is bad. But that really doesn't fix the problem since your original issue was definitely not the CDRom.

But who knows, if you can get Windows loaded maybe the original issue will no longer be a problem.

If you don't have an external CD you could be a bit sneaky and purchase one then return it after you have used it. Tell them you meant to get a DVDRW instead of CDRW or something.