Tek-Tips is the largest IT community on the Internet today!

Members share and learn making Tek-Tips Forums the best source of peer-reviewed technical information on the Internet!

  • Congratulations bkrike on being selected by the Tek-Tips community for having the most helpful posts in the forums last week. Way to Go!

Toshiba Laptop Display & Boot Problems

Status
Not open for further replies.

mob46x

Technical User
Jan 30, 2004
24
US
Toshiba P205D-S7438 w/updated BIOS 1.4 encountered a weird display/boot problem. Laptop boots and screen displays characters but reports \windows\system32\winload.exe (0xc000000e) error which I am not sure is related or a 2nd issue. Load Vista 32 disk to attempt repair, screen shows loading then screen remains black and only mouse pointer remains. Tried MiniPE Live Disk and after initial load screen also remains black. Don't believe this is driver related as Live Disk does not depend on Vista drivers. Ran Eurosoft PC-Check 6.05 and it failed LCD TEST but ran other hardware diagnostics and all Video tests passed. Connecting external monitor delivers equal results. Please help... Thanks...
 
first remove all your USB devices from the afflicted machine and then try to boot... report back...

as to the 0xc000000e error, this denotes that the BOOT device is not set in the WINLOADER config file, and thus can not continue to load the OS...

see if the following is of help:





Ben
"If it works don't fix it! If it doesn't use a sledgehammer..."
How to ask a question, when posting them to a professional forum.
Only ask questions with yes/no answers if you want "yes" or "no"
 
There is nothing plugged into the USB during boot. I have not attempted to fix the boot error since the screen still blanks out as initially reported. Thanks for your help...
 
Sounds to me like a bad hard drive or else corrupted system files.

If you're able, I suggest this series of steps:
[ol][li]Remove the hard drive, grab what data off via another computer (if the data is important).[/li]
[li]Put the hard drive back in the laptop.[/li]
[li]Download utlimate boot cd.[/li]
[li]Boot from it, and run various HDD tests to see if the HDD is failing.[/li]
[li]If passes all tests, then it may be okay.[/li]
[li]If HDD is dead, or if you aren't sure... or if you'd rather just go ahead and get a faster drive anyhow, this is my particular favorite laptop hard drive, currently (assuming yours is SATA and not IDE:
2nd favorite: Interesting note: price has INCREASED on those drives both at NewEgg and Amazon. NewEgg doesn't currently carry the one with the free fall sensor. Both come with a 5 year warranty.
If you have an IDE hard drive, then any of these should work just fine:
I've installed the 2 SATA drives by WD in 3 or 4 laptops besides my own. I installed the one w/o the freefall sensor in the others, the freefall sensor in mine. The only reason for the difference is that I didn't know there was a model with freefall sensor when I installed the others - oh well. With EVERY install so far, the drive has been extremely quite, run cool (for a fast hard drive), and every system has just JUMPED to tasks - well, not literally of course! [wink]
[/li]
[li]Reinstall the OS - easiest fix, anyway, and probably quickest, assuming you don't have TONS and TONS of custom software configurations to carry out.[/li]
[li]In the end, it wouldn't hurt after the reinstall (unless you prefer to reinstall everything manually each time) to use Acronis True Image, or else Norton Ghost, to create a system backup, so you can always just go back to that backup quickly if anything such as this happens again.[/li][/ol]

Oh, on the hard drives, you CAN get cheaper drives, but the absolute most you'll save will likely be $30 or $40, and they'll have a 1 or 3 year warranty vs 5. Choice is yours. [bigglasses]

--

"If to err is human, then I must be some kind of human!" -Me
 
Oh, I thought I'd look around for cheaper prices on the hard drive I mentioned. Sure enough, I found it cheaper:

It comes to just under $84 with shipping to where I'm at: SC, USA. So, the shipping could be different depending upon location. I'm not sure where it ships from at this point.

Here's the search I used to find that price:

And Nowdirect has good reviews, at least per the Google search - I can't say, as I've never purchased from them to date... that I can remember.

--

"If to err is human, then I must be some kind of human!" -Me
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Part and Inventory Search

Sponsor

Back
Top