Toshiba satelite L300 help please

zoelouise88

Looking for someone who knows about laptops

I have a toshiba satelite L300 and for some reason it just wont work.

I boot up and it goes to start up and gives me the option to start up repair or start up normally, ive tried start up repair but it runs but just doesnt end ive had it running constantly for hours. Start up normally just makes the computer restart. Ive tried holding down 0 on start up and have ran a memory diagnostic test but says no problems found (it is still picking up vista as this comes up when i do this) ive tried factory resetiing but after i f8 and selet keyboard language the screen goes grey and doesnt do anything.

Please help i do not have the money to take it to get it looked at as ive een quoted £80 just for soeone to look at it.

pogofish

Sounds like the hard disc has died. Esp the running for hours on -"repair"

Replacement discs are pretty cheap on Ebay and the work is easy enough for your model:

HDD is placed at the bottom side under HDD cover. HDD cover is secured with two screws. Remove the screws and then HDD cover. Please do this gently. After doing this remove the HDD pack by pulling on the tab attached to the pack, following the direction of the arrows.

According the notebook specification you need SATA HDD and it can be upgraded up to 500 GB.
After HDD upgrade use recovery DVD for operating system installation.

After that, you just recover from your backups.

zoelouise88

pogofish wrote: »

Sounds like the hard disc has died. Esp the running for hours on -"repair"

Replacement discs are pretty cheap on Ebay and the work is easy enough for your model:



After that, you just recover from your backups.

Hi thanks for the reply by hard disc do you mean hard drive? I haven't backed anything up on my laptop so will I lose all pictures by replacing this?

TakeThis

If you have not made copies of your important data, buy this external caddy: ebay.co.uk/itm/2-5-SATA-USB-Hard-Disk-Drive-Enclosure-Caddy-HDD-/250738785249 for £3.19. Take the hard drive out as indicated earlier and stick it in the caddy. Then you'll have a portable external hard drive that you can plug into another computer in order to copy off your important data.

Then you can put the hard drive back into the machine and we can get on with the repair.

If you are too scared to take the HDD out; you can use a Live CD, such as Ubuntu: ubuntu.com/download/ubuntu/download in order to retrieve your important data. Create the disc as per instructions, pop the disc into the Toshiba and re-boot. Press F12 as it re-starts and choose CD/DVD drive as the first option. Then choose the 'Try Ubuntu' option.

An Operating System will run in the RAM only which will give you the option to navigate to the HDD and to copy off your important data with perhaps a USB thumb drive or an external HDD.

pogofish

zoelouise88 wrote: »

Hi thanks for the reply by hard disc do you mean hard drive? I haven't backed anything up on my laptop so will I lose all pictures by replacing this?

If you can access the drive - as described above, then yes you should be ok.

However if the drive is damaged beyond recovery, then you may have lost them.

After this, keep backups!

GunJack

sounds like vista has been corrupted rather than hdd failure, often happens when the machine is shut down in the middle of installing windows updates, either by overheating/forced power off/etc - vista seems particularly prone to this.

Rather than ubuntu live cd, try hiren's bootcd and run miniXP. This will give a not-too-techie person an easier windows-style interface to work with to copy files off onto a USB device, then reinstall windows

sonstream

GunJack wrote: »

sounds like vista has been corrupted rather than hdd failure, often happens when the machine is shut down in the middle of installing windows updates, either by overheating/forced power off/etc - vista seems particularly prone to this.

i thought of vista as soon as i saw the op i usedto have this a lot on a desktop of a friend just hit repair and then get the vista disk in the cd rom and off it went repairing itself