Blinking orrange light - toshiba satellite a10

[acemario]

Thanks for the wonderful input on my other question. Well, in troubleshooting, I put in a hard drve and it won't boot. Goes straight to an orange blinking light. With no hard disk it boots to wait for a disk. I've tried three different hard disks and none works. All give the same blinking light when i turn it on. I have to remove battery to get it to turn off and back on. Anyone experience this before?

 

[Krosus]

Sounds like the hardware is coded only to use a specific HD, some manufacturers used to do this all the time so you had to buy spares from them and nobody else, Seems like its the case here well that or a faulty IDE controller.

 

[vacunita]

is there actually something to boot from in these hard drives? As in, do they have an OS installed?

In addition does the BIOS pick up the hard drives???



----------------------------------
Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.

 

[ASG0856]

Sounds like you battery has gone kaput. The battery on my Toshiba laptop only lasted 4 years. And I seem to remember when running on battery and it discharged, the orange light would start to flash.
As far as I am aware Toshiba do not code their laptops for specific hardware. I replaced the 20Gb HDD with an 80Gb I got from my local computer shop. Post fit, when running the recovery CD, it recognised the HDD and proceeded to partition it into 3 logical drives for me.

 

[acemario]

ASG0856,
So do you think because the battery may be a goner that there's not enough juice from the AC adapter to fire up the HD? Perhaps I may have the wrong AC? Hmmmm...

Thanks. At least that's an avenue I can explore.
Mario

 

[gbaughma]

So do you think because the battery may be a goner that there's not enough juice from the AC adapter to fire up the HD?

I have seen this happen before; yes... that is a distinct possibility. If your battery is internally shorted, it will pull down the power to the point that it won't fire up the rest of the computer.

This is easy to check, however. Just pull the battery out. If it boots up on AC, that was your problem. ;-)



Just my 2¢
-There once was a man from Peru
Who wanted to write a Haiku
but...

--Greg

http://parallel.tzo.com

 

[acemario]

Thanks guys for all the input. Think it's time to throw in the towel.

SO...

Toshiba Satellite A10 - for sale! Needs work... CHEAP!
lol

 

[ASG0856]

As a final point, some AC adapters power the laptop, others constantly recharge the battery, so the laptop is always running off the battery. Now I know my laptop works by the first method, but maybe toshiba changed it, who knows (except toshiba of course)