Hello everyone,

I have a hand-me-down notebook, specifically a Toshiba Portege 4010. I got it from someone who's workplace was upgrading and didn't need this one anymore. After digging around on the Toshiba website, I found out this laptop is 4 yrs old. I opened it up and it has a 60 GB hard drive, but the bluetooth and wireless card is missing. I'm not sure if it has a memory card. So here's the problem. Once I turn it on a Toshiba screen comes on with approximately 5 options on the bottom. Sometimes, I am able to chose which option I want, other times the laptop just skips it and goes to a black screen with the underscore blinking for some time. After a couple of seconds, the following message appears "a disk read error occurred press Ctrl alt delete to restart". This goes on in loops. I can never reach windows. Even when I am able to pick a choice on the Toshiba screen, like hard drive, it still goes to the blank screen then to the disk read error message. This continues until I turn off the computer. At one point the laptop asked me to press F1 and showed me a table with information, a friend said it might have been the BIOS screen. I can't make the screen come up anymore. O and the laptop has the Windows XP Professional sticker on the back of it.

If you have any knowledge in this field, please help.

Thank you for very much for your time and attention.

Considering that it's a 4 year old hand-me-down that someone has already pilfered parts out of:

1. The drive could be physically damaged.
2. The installed operating system could be corrupted.
3. The last owner may have wiped the operating system entirely.

* The "F1" key probably did take you to the BIOS setup page(s). Try to get in to the setup again and look around there for anything that list information on the hard drive. Let us know what, if anything, you find.

* Try booting the computer from a Windows installation CD. Will the computer at least boot that way? Does the installation routine detect the drive? If so, your best bet is to do a full reformat and reinstallation of Windows; even if there is a working version of Windows installed on the Hard drive, it could be full of problems.