Member Avatar for mike18510

I have a 4 year old Toshiba A75-S209 that crashed from a virus of some kind. I used the Toshiba restore disk (windows xp home) and was able to go thru the install process. At the end of the install it tells you to remove the disk and press any key. After removing the disk and pressing any key, the computer shuts down and gives me the toshiba splash screen with the F@ & F12 options at the bottom & then goes to an all black screen with a flashing cursor in the upper left corner. This is the same thing that was happening before I used the restore disk, any ideas?

Thanks,

Mike

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A few targeted, practical checks and fixes that haven't been suggested yet — for and building on 's troubleshooting.

First, confirm the hard drive is actually seen by the firmware/boot menu. Enter the BIOS/boot menu and verify a drive model is listed and that the internal disk is the first hard-disk boot device. If the drive is not shown the restore could not finish or the drive is failing; in that case remove and reseat the drive connector or test the drive externally with a USB adapter on another PC.

If the drive is visible but Windows still drops to a blinking cursor, repair the XP boot code from a proper Windows XP install CD using the Recovery Console. Boot the CD, press R for Recovery Console, choose the Windows installation and run (in this order):

fixmbr
fixboot C:
bootcfg /rebuild
chkdsk /r

fixmbr and fixboot address corrupt MBR/boot sector; bootcfg /rebuild re-creates boot.ini; chkdsk /r finds and repairs file system errors.

If there is important data on the disk, image the drive before running repairs — attempts to rewrite the boot area or run chkdsk can make recovery harder on a failing disk. Use a Linux live USB or a disk-imaging tool to copy the contents to another drive. If diagnostics (SMART or vendor tools) show bad sectors or the drive is intermittently missing from BIOS, replace the drive and restore from the recovery media or a fresh Windows install.

If the Recovery Console commands fail or report I/O errors, the most likely root causes are hardware failure or a botched restore image; in that case prioritize imaging/data recovery, then install a new drive and run the Toshiba restore or a clean Windows install.

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Member Avatar for Chaky

Press f8 while booting and select last known good configuration. If that fails, try safe mode.

Member Avatar for mike18510

Thanks for the tip, I tried both of those and still nothing, it always goes back to the black screen.

Member Avatar for Chaky

Did the disk restoration go well (no error messages)?

When you tried safe mode, did you see the list of drivers that were loaded? (it splashes the list briefly)

You should try reseating RAM.

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