Toshhiba satellite A110 162

[HTB1]

Daughter's laptop has gone into a loop on start up. On switching on it appears to start normally Windows XP "Windows is starting up..." then after a five seconds the screen goes blank and the Toshiba logo comes up - along the bottom of the screen comes the message Press F2 to enter setup F12 for boot device selection menu etc then it goes back to the Windows is starting up .. msg with no external input. The loop lasts about 40 secs, during the loop I think I can hear the hd spin up briefly. Apparently it has not being dropped/mishandled. Has anyone any tips ( it contains all her course work)

 

[(RIP) Kaister]

if you have no luck and are about to pay someone to fix it - try this.

Download a live cd image of a linux distro - something like MEPISis fine.
burn the image to cd and put it in the toshiba - on startup - hit F12 and boot from the CD

to retrieve the files - they'll all show up - plug in and external drive and drag and drop them over.

thats assuming you haven't got a windows xp disc to do the same with

 

[jailon]

throw a copy of XP into the drive and boot from CD, when the options come up choose R to repair.

when you see the command prompt, run commands such as chkdsk /p and chkdsk /r.

You could try run fixmbr and select yes.

This usually sorts it out as it sounds like the boot sector has gone corrupt

also you could try getting on of these (link below) to recover the course work, basically you plug the laptop hard drive in to it, then connect this to the USB of another computer, this way you can copy over all the documents so at least it saved

http://www.cclonline.com/product-info.asp?product_id=12997&category_id=503&manufacturer_id=0