Laptop keeps cutting out on boot

[tuiruru]

Hi

I’ve got a Toshiba Sattelite A 300 which I may have got as far back as 2008, It’s running Vista Home Premium SP2.

A bit before Christmas it started “acting up” in that it sometimes it wouldn’t complete the boot process, but re-booting it a couple of times usually “got me in”.
Things gradually became worse and a few things pointed to it being a corrupt MFT file possibly sitting on a physically bad sector (eg a Defrag program I’ve got, when performing a boot time defrag, managed to do all the files it was looking at except that one, and running a Check and repair from inside Windows would manage so much and then the power would cut out.

The laptop actually came with two separate 300+ GB physical drives, so I backed up the data of the second one, reformatted it and tried to restore an image, or use the “Rescue Discs” that I had created when I got the laptop. I had also removed the primary drive. I was still thinking that if I could get a cleanish windows install I could then run a repair to fix the supposedly corrupt MFT file.By this time things were getting pretty dire. When starting the computer it would crash out almost immediately, but if I kept re-starting, each time it would let me get a little further thru’ the boot process, even as far as starting to install the image, or the recovery process and then would crash again, at that was as far as I’ve been able to get. I even managed to” borrow” a Vista Installation disc and one time got as far as it requesting the serial number, but no further. I did find that if I ejected the CD drive tray with the installation disc at boot, before it was fully accessed, it would prompt me to do a “memory” (by which I took it to mean RAM) test. I got this to run three passes (with cache enabled) at the third (most thorough) setting, which took a bit over an hour in total, but it didn’t report any problems. As a last ditch attempt I took the RAM chips out and put them back in, just to be sure that they were seated properly.

So, the theory now is that it is a hardware fault, but I don’t really know where to go with things from here on in. I’ve grabbed a lot of “free for 24 hours” software that I use, but would obviously “lose” if I had to start again from scratch. On top of that, I’m “rural” and sitting on a copper wire that is about as far from the local exchange as it can be and still “support” broadband. It takes me at least an hour to download 100 megs!
I await your responses, tho’ I must admit that at this stage I’m not that hopeful of a satisfactory (from my point of view) resolution. I’ve got a couple of deadlines to meet, hence the desperation to get “the old stuff” up and running again. All my data IS backed up on external drive (in addition to several images) – at least I managed to get that done before things really turned to custard!

[Speedy Gonzales]

If it's crashing what does the BSOD say? If it's got 2 hdd's remove the one that's crashing it and try the other one, if you can.

Or remove one while you're installing windows (do both have to be connected when you reinstall windows)? See if it crashes again. Otherwise one of them maybe knackered

[dugimodo]

See if you can boot off a linux Live CD to eliminate a hardware fault.
Also Check that it's not simply clogged up with dust and shutting down due to heat. A bit tricky an a laptop so one method is to give it short bursts of air into the intake vents or bursts of suction with a vaccuum cleaner. Problem with that and why you only do bursts is it will forcibly spin any fans at high speed which is not good for them.

[1101]

and then the power would cut out

Could be overheating, faulty power supply, faulty motherboard.
as well as a suspect Hard Drive : bad sectors :dont re-use it .

- chances are the laptop is near the end of its usefull life, it may not be economic to have it repaired.

[tuiruru]

If it's crashing what does the BSOD say? If it's got 2 hdd's remove the one that's crashing it and try the other one, if you can.

Or remove one while you're installing windows (do both have to be connected when you reinstall windows)? See if it crashes again. Otherwise one of them maybe knackered

Sorry Speedy, no BSOD. When I said "crashing" I really meant the power cut out, so it had to be restarted.
The original, "suspect" drive has been removed, and an install on the other drive attempted, but the power still cuts so cant get as far as completing a new install.

[tuiruru]

See if you can boot off a linux Live CD to eliminate a hardware fault.
Also Check that it's not simply clogged up with dust and shutting down due to heat. A bit tricky an a laptop so one method is to give it short bursts of air into the intake vents or bursts of suction with a vaccuum cleaner. Problem with that and why you only do bursts is it will forcibly spin any fans at high speed which is not good for them.

Yeah, I did wonder about dust and stuff - it's probably got a fair bit inside it, given our house (NB that's NOT a criticism of SWMBO's house keeping skills! Thought I'd better make that clear...... ie it would be safer for me ). Thanks for the "short burst" tip though.

Not sure where I can get a Linux Live CD tho' How would using that eliminate a hardware fault?

[tuiruru]

Could be overheating, faulty power supply, faulty motherboard.
as well as a suspect Hard Drive : bad sectors :dont re-use it .

- chances are the laptop is near the end of its usefull life, it may not be economic to have it repaired.

"Roger" to all of that 13. Depressing prognosis eh?

[dugimodo]

Most linux distro's installation disks can be used as a live CD/DVD these days, http://www.linuxmint.com/download.html for one. Not sure if it's the best option, http://puppylinux.org/main/Download%...%20Release.htm gets suggested a lot but I haven't tried it myself. You just need to download it and burn it to disk, set the BIOS to boot from CD first, then boot off it and select the live option.

It eliminates a hardware fault if it boots up and works without problems, just in case it's something corrupted in windows causing the power downs etc. A useful tool any time you are not sure if it's hardware or software as it give's you an OS you can boot into totally independant of what's installed. Also lets you browse the net etc with a broken OS and try to recover lost files. Can be handy.

[wuppo]

Start it up and go into the bios setup and leave it there for 15 minutes. If it doesn't crash, disable all but one of the CPU cores (if you have that facility in the bios), then try booting up on battery only. If it does boot, google "Proadlizer problems with Toshiba". badcaps.net has some good info.

[PPp]

Could be graphics card. My computer was crashing occasionally and I tracked it down to a slightly noisy graphics fan. Pulled it all apart,cleaned everything applied new thermal grease and reassembled seems good now.