Need help from Windows Gurus...

Alright, my POS Toshiba laptop is starting to act up. It crashed recently and would get stuck in a bluescreen looping reboot. The error message was always too quick to read.

So I reinstalled Windows, and everything seemed to be working fine.

Today, it fucking did it again. First, the machine froze. So I turned it off (using the on/off button, since no keys worked to reboot "properly").

Now it's stuck in that frickin' loop again. But I got a shot of the error message:

It then tries to reboot...only to hit that error again.

Am I fucked again and going to have to reinstall? I'm starting to wonder if maybe I have a bad hard drive and that may be causing it.

Any help GREATLY appreciated.

It could be the harddrive. I had a Toshiba laptop (satellite p25 i believe) that crashed and burned through 4 hdd's before i bought a new computer.

Oh, and if you get it booted back up, start saving all your files on dvd or cds. If yours is anything like mine, you wont be able to recover them off the hdd after it dies.

Good luck!

Luckily, I have everything important on an external drive. I might lose a couple emails..but that's not too big of a deal, I usually keep my email on IMAP.

Can you get it to boot in safe mode? Maybe safe mode command line only?

If you can, try a chkdsk /R - it will scan the hard drive for errors.

Sounds like you do have a hardware problem

My favorite hard disk utility - will find bad sectors and recover any data in them:

http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm

Much better and more sophisticated than chkdsk - chkdsk is free, but spinrite costs....

Unfortunately, I tried safe mode and safe mode with command prompt. Same problem.

I even tried booting off the XP disc. When I got to the prompt, I did the chkdsk, and it found nothing wrong with it.

I also tried having the XP disc write a new boot sector (not even sure if that's what I needed), but it didn't matter...same problem.

What pisses me off even more is this thing was just in for a power cord problem. but since it's Best Buy, they had the thing for three fucking weeks. And this problem only started AFTER coming back. I'm going to be REAL pissed if they want to send it off to be fixed and it's gone for ANOTHER three weeks.

Three weeks is totally unacceptable. I should tell them to save the trouble and just give me a new hard drive. (Or better still, give me a new laptop)

I would not get another harddrive, it only cost me more trouble. Try to get a new laptop all together if its at all possible.

Oh, and my Dad's toshiba laptop did the same thing. Toshiba laptops for some reason all have the same error, I have heard of this happening to tons of others as well.

Totally off the wall, but it has fixed errors on a couple of laptops I've messed with.

Power off, remove the RAM, replace the RAM making sure it is seated well. See if that changes things. From the sounds of your problem, maybe not, but who knows. It's a free shot.

This assumes the RAM is not totally soldered onto the MB, which is possible.

Oh yea, another thing to try is disconnect the laptop from the power source. Take out the battery. Hold down the power button for a minute or so, this will drain all the capacitors in the computer and hopefully it might boot up again. Worth a shot at least!

It's the drive. To stop the rebooting loop, if you ever get it up and running, right click on my computer, select properties, go into the advanced tab, select startup and recovery settings and uncheck the restart option.

If one of the hives of the registry keeps getting corrupted there is a very strong chance it's a physical hard disk issue, or the disk controller.

I actually agree with Xorand - Problems that you sometimes think are a bad HD could actually be bad Ram. I had a similar problem with a Desktop which would blue screen and then work for a while then blue screen again a few weeks later after a reinstall - Turned out it was a bad stick of Ram.

Either way tho - Sounds like it will be heading back to Best Buy if it's under warranty. Good luck.

Make sure you don't have a CMOS battery that's on it's way out also...

The CMOS holds the drive information

Well, Best Buy has it now.

If it's just the hard drive, they can do that in store (should only be 3-4 days...so they say). If it's anything else (like motherboard, built-in RAM, etc) it has to be sent out again.

BETTER be the frickin' drive.

Update. It was the hard drive.

It must have been pretty bad and I was just lucky to have it last as long as it did. They replaced the 4200rpm 60GB Travelstar with a 5400rpm Western Digital 60GB Scorpio.

It is running SO much faster, it's ridiculous.

Thanks for all the help, everyone!

ETA: Now I get the fun job of updating everything and reinstalling all my software...looks like a fun night!