Toshiba Portege M200 Boot Problems

[JohnnyPhantom]

Hey Everyone!
I'm stuck and could use a hand ^-^

I have a Toshiba Portege M200 thats giving me a head ache :P

I just got the machine, it was working great but was used, and I wanted to erase everything on it and start fresh. I preformed the steps listed here http://home.allegiance.tv/~joem298/ and everything worked great!

I then messed up the software while trying a few things to configure the machine to more of my liking (software wise, have not changed the hardware at all).

Decided it be best to just start over again, so once again I do http://home.allegiance.tv/~joem298/

but now, I get nothing.. :(

The M200 only supports a handful of Toshiba's CD/DVD drives to boot from, I do not have any. The recovery CD is just a bootable Ghost imager. When i preform the steps from http://home.allegiance.tv/~joem298/ I get the Ghost imager to come up, it formats the drive, loads the files, says complete, reboots and then all i get is the post, then a blank screen with a flashing DOS cursor in the top left "_" thats it. I've attempted to re-ghost the machine several times, trying different things like formatting the hard drive first, or creating a partition and not formatting first, or even removing all partitions first, and then running the Ghost app. each time the same result.

Then I tried a few hardware changes, I installed known good Memory, a known good hard drive, playing with the limited system bios (which are updated to the highest) and nada.

I even removed the hard drive from this machine and installed it into a sled to see if Ghost was actually writing files to it, and it is, every-things there.

Any suggestions?

Thanks everyone!

[Rik from RCE]

Looks like you will have to install it with an original Microsoft Windows cd.

[W1ND0W5]

Looks like you will have to install it with an original Microsoft Windows cd.

True, he could be pushing a bad image on to the drive. He could try re-installing the MBR.

[Rik from RCE]

That's exactly what I'm thinking!

[W1ND0W5]

Steps to recover the MBR:
1) Get an original Windows CD.
2) Start your laptop from it and enter recovery console.
3) Do these commands.
fixmbr /rebuild
fixboot /restore